Learning the basics of computer science lesson iv

Good afternoon all users of this great platform, I guess today has been such a smooth running one especially as we all have to out for a little piece of enjoyment coming of the backdrop of too many working activities that starts from Mondays and ends on Fridays.

In our last computer lesson class, we discussed a lot about the interesting aspects of computer that talks about its architectural aspects to its buses, their uses and many more other things and today, we shall be starting from the three distinctly forms of architecture.

To recall, we talked about the computer architecture to mean a construction of varied combination of standards of computers by different companies

hence, we shall be looking forward to explaining some of the available three distinctly forms of architecture and they are;

A. Single-chip computers

B.Single-board computers and lastly,

C. The multiple-board bus-based computers.

The single-chip computers

The single-chip computers are those found in such devices as watches, cameras, et cetera. Their processors are specialized and well programmed in order to do some specific tasks and apart from the remarkable operations some of these devices do, they are still not immidiately recognizable as computers.

The single-board computers

These computers are usually much more bigger than the single-chip computers but are still very much and relatively small.

They are constructed on a thin flat sheets of electrical board that is well known as the Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). This single-board computers fall into two broad categories namely:

1. The small general-purpose microcomputers such as the small home computers

   and many more basic PCs.

2. The special-purpose computers which are often uses for applications involving the control of the physical process.

A typical example would be systems controlling a small-scale chemical plant or controlling the operation of a complex milling machine.

3. The multiple-board bus-based computers are usually a general-purpose computers. They are normally too large to fit onto a single board. Instead, each board has a particular function a d all boards are interconnected by plugging them into the individual slots on one or more general-purpose buses.

One board may contain the processor, while another board may contain the main storage, and so on. Many minicomputers and mainframes are based upon this type of construction and sometimes, there are usually a primary board that is called the motherboard for the processor and other main components into which other boards may be slotted.

Given all the above and well explained three distinctly different forms of architecture that are available to us, we now narrow our article by concluding with another sub-heading being;

"The memory Hierarchy"

It should be understood that in a computer system, memory is used for storing both the instructions and the data for the program to be well executed.

The instructions are however fetched from the memory by the CPU and it will at once decode the data operands in order to be operated upon for which the instructions are retrieved from or stored to memory.

Memory on the other hand is typically organized into several levels called Hierarchy and The closer the memory is to the CPU, the faster and the more expensive it is hence, the memory Hierarchy includes the following levels namely:

(I.) Register files

(II.) Cache memory (l1&l2)

(III.) Main memory and lastly,

(IV.) Secondary or External or Auxiliary memory (disk, tapes, et cetera.).

I guess we have to draw the curtain close here for today while we shall start with the explanation of these Four basic memory Hierarchy that are listed above in our Lesson IV tomorrow.

Pls stay tuned for more and thanks for reading my article.🤗

I really do love ❤️ you all.

Image credit: unsplash photo.com.