Questions tagged [computer-architecture]
Computer architecture is the abstract description and specification of why, what, and how various hardware and software components are combined to create a computing device. This tag should be used with questions about the relationship between components making up a computer, what components are included or excluded in a computer, how components are connected, what data flows over the connections, and why components and connections are good choices.
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How many bits' address is required for a computer with n bytes of memory?
How many bits of address is required (for the program counter for example) in a byte-addressed computer with 512 Mbyte RAM?
What does the formula look like?
How is this connected with the fact that ...
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How can I tell whether my computer is Harvard or von Neumann architecture?
I understand the difference between the two architectures is the separation of instructions from data in the Harvard architecture. But how do I know which type of system I'm on? Is it possible to ...
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Has Little Endian won?
When teaching recently about the Big vs. Little Endian battle, a student asked whether it had been settled, and I realized I didn't know. Looking at the Wikipedia article, it seems that the most ...
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List structures in memory
Could anyone give an overview of how list structures which are composed of a
head and a tail which references the rest of the list i.e linked list are represented in memory of the computer? Does the ...
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When to distinguish OS versions in canonical names for target platforms
I would like to organize my company's software releases by platform. I've looked at how Mozilla, Perforce, and Apache organize their releases, and it seems that I should partition by OS and processor ...
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Why do computer architecture textbooks prefer MIPS architecture?
I have read a lot of computer architecture textbooks, and I wonder why most of them (if not all) used MIPS as the architecture to teach. Why MIPS and not Intel or AMD or something else? What makes the ...
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Computers that operate exclusively on boolean algebra
I was wondering if there are any computers that operate exclusively on boolean operations. For example, no add, sub, mult, or div in the instruction set (although these could be emulated with the ...
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Is it possible to take a binary compiled for ARMv7 architecture and convert it to ARMv6?
Is it possible to take a binary compiled for ARMv7 architecture and convert it to ARMv6 ?
Are there any tools that can do this?
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Learning computer architecture as a programmer [closed]
I typically run across gurus at SO and other places (instructors, book authors etc.) that would say something along the lines "This will cause alignment issues" or other low level tidbits.
I want to ...
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Can increased usage of higher and higher programming languages lead to a deficit of programmers with computer architecture knowledge?
Quote from Wikipedia of the article "High-level programming language":
A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In ...
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