General
What is the Case or Tower?
The main part of a personal computer that contains the motherboard, memory, drives, and ports.
What is the control unit?
This part of the CPU directs and coordinates most of the operations in the computer
What is MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second)?
The speed of the operations is measure using this.
Size of memory is measured by the number of these available?
The number of addressable locations (or bytes).
What is memory?
Used to store data, instructions and information.
What is the Motherboard?
This contains many of the electronic components of the system unit.
What is fetching (to fetch)?
This operation of the control unit involves getting information from memory.
What is the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)?
Performs the execution part of the machine cycle such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division
What is a megabyte?
One million bytes.
What is the Central Processing Unit (CPU)?
Interprets and carries out the basic instructions that operate a computer (brains of the computer)
What is decoding?
This operation of the control unit involves translating the instruction.
What is pipelining?
This is when the CPU begins execution of a second instruction before the first instruction is completed resulting in faster processing.
What is a kilobyte?
One thousand bytes.
What is executing?
This operation of the control unit involves carrying out the command.
What is registers?
Temporary storage location by the CPU.
What is read only memory (ROM)?
This type of memory cannot be modified.
The system clock is measured using this.
Megahertz (MHz)?
What is storing command?
This operation of the control unit involves writing the result to memory.
What is a system clock?
Synchronizes all computer operations.
What is random access memory (RAM)?
When the computer starts in the system unit, operating system files are loaded from a hard disk to this type of memory.
What is a heat sink (or heat pipe for laptops)?
Small ceramic or metal component with fins on its surface that is designed to absorb and ventilate heat produced by electrical components.