Computer hardware

The physical elements of a computer, its hardware, are generally divided into the central processing unit (CPU), main memory (or random-access memory, RAM), and peripherals. The last class encompasses all sorts of input and output (I/O) devices: keyboard, display monitor, printer, disk drives, network connections, scanners, and more.

 

The CPU and RAM are integrated circuits (ICs)—small silicon wafers, or chips, that contain thousands or millions of transistors that function as electrical switches. In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, stated what has become known as Moore's law: the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every 18 months. Moore suggested that financial constraints would soon cause his law to break down, but it has been remarkably accurate for far longer than he first envisioned. It now appears that technical constraints may finally invalidate Moore's law, since sometime between 2010 and 2020 transistors would have to consist of only a few atoms each, at which point the laws of quantum physics imply that they would cease to function reliably.

 

Central processing unit

The CPU provides the circuits that implement the computer's instruction set—its machine language. It is composed of an arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) and control circuits. The ALU carries out basic arithmetic and logic operations, and the control section determines the sequence of operations, including branch instructions that transfer control from one part of a program to another. Although the main memory was once considered part of the CPU, today it is regarded as separate. The boundaries shift, however, and CPU chips now also contain some high-speed cache memory where data and instructions are temporarily stored for fast access.
The ALU has circuits that add, subtract, multiply, and divide two arithmetic values, as well as circuits for logic operations such as AND and OR (where a 1 is interpreted as true and a 0 as false, so that, for instance, 1 AND 0 = 0; see Boolean algebra). The ALU has several to more than a hundred registers that temporarily hold results of its computations for further arithmetic operations or for transfer to main memory.
The circuits in the CPU control section provide branch instructions, which make elementary decisions about what instruction to execute next. For example, a branch instruction might be “If the result of the last ALU operation is negative, jump to location A in the program; otherwise, continue with the following instruction.” Such instructions allow “if-then-else” decisions in a program and execution of a sequence of instructions, such as a “while-loop” that repeatedly does some set of instructions while some condition is met. A related instruction is the subroutine call, which transfers execution to a subprogram and then, after the subprogram finishes, returns to the main program where it left off.
In a stored-program computer, programs and data in memory are indistinguishable. Both are bit patterns—strings of 0s and 1s—that may be interpreted either as data or as program instructions, and both are fetched from memory by the CPU. The CPU has a program counter that holds the memory address (location) of the next instruction to be executed. The basic operation of the CPU is the “fetch-decode-execute” cycle:

• Fetch the instruction from the address held in the program counter, and store it in a register.
• Decode the instruction. Parts of it specify the operation to be done, and parts specify the data on which it is to operate. These may be in CPU registers or in memory locations. If it is a branch instruction, part of it will contain the memory address of the next instruction to execute once the branch condition is satisfied.
• Fetch the operands, if any.
• Execute the operation if it is an ALU operation.
• Store the result (in a register or in memory), if there is one.
• Update the program counter to hold the next instruction location, which is either the next memory location or the address specified by a branch instruction.

At the end of these steps the cycle is ready to repeat, and it continues until a special halt instruction stops execution.
Steps of this cycle and all internal CPU operations are regulated by a clock that oscillates at a high frequency (now typically measured in gigahertz, or billions of cycles per second). Another factor that affects performance is the “word” size—the number of bits that are fetched at once from memory and on which CPU instructions operate. Digital words now consist of 32 or 64 bits, though sizes from 8 to 128 bits are seen.
Processing instructions one at a time, or serially, often creates a bottleneck because many program instructions may be ready and waiting for execution. Since the early 1980s, CPU design has followed a style originally called reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC). This design minimizes the transfer of data between memory and CPU (all ALU operations are done only on data in CPU registers) and calls for simple instructions that can execute very quickly. As the number of transistors on a chip has grown, the RISC design requires a relatively small portion of the CPU chip to be devoted to the basic instruction set. The remainder of the chip can then be used to speed CPU operations by providing circuits that let several instructions execute simultaneously, or in parallel.
There are two major kinds of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) in the CPU, both first used in early supercomputers. One is the pipeline, which allows the fetch-decode-execute cycle to have several instructions under way at once. While one instruction is being executed, another can obtain its operands, a third can be decoded, and a fourth can be fetched from memory. If each of these operations requires the same time, a new instruction can enter the pipeline at each phase and (for example) five instructions can be completed in the time that it would take to complete one without a pipeline. The other sort of ILP is to have multiple execution units in the CPU—duplicate arithmetic circuits, in particular, as well as specialized circuits for graphics instructions or for floating-point calculations (arithmetic operations involving noninteger numbers, such as 3.27). With this “superscalar” design, several instructions can execute at once.
Both forms of ILP face complications. A branch instruction might render preloaded instructions in the pipeline useless if they entered it before the branch jumped to a new part of the program. Also, superscalar execution must determine whether an arithmetic operation depends on the result of another operation, since they cannot be executed simultaneously. CPUs now have additional circuits to predict whether a branch will be taken and to analyze instructional dependencies. These have become highly sophisticated and can frequently rearrange instructions to execute more of them in parallel.

 

Main memory

The earliest forms of computer main memory were mercury delay lines, which were tubes of mercury that stored data as ultrasonic waves, and cathode-ray tubes, which stored data as charges on the tubes' screens. The magnetic drum, invented about 1948, used an iron oxide coating on a rotating drum to store data and programs as magnetic patterns.

In a binary computer any bistable device (something that can be placed in either of two states) can represent the two possible bit values of 0 and 1 and can thus serve as computer memory. Magnetic-core memory, the first relatively cheap RAM device, appeared in 1952. It was composed of tiny, doughnut-shaped ferrite magnets threaded on the intersection points of a two-dimensional wire grid. These wires carried currents to change the direction of each core's magnetization, while a third wire threaded through the doughnut detected its magnetic orientation.
The first integrated circuit (IC) memory chip appeared in 1971. IC memory stores a bit in a transistor-capacitor combination. The capacitor holds a charge to represent a 1 and no charge for a 0; the transistor switches it between these two states. Because a capacitor charge gradually decays, IC memory is dynamic RAM (DRAM), which must have its stored values refreshed periodically (every 20 milliseconds or so). There is also static RAM (SRAM), which does not have to be refreshed. Although faster than DRAM, SRAM uses more transistors and is thus more costly; it is used primarily for CPU internal registers and cache memory.
In addition to main memory, computers generally have special video memory (VRAM) to hold graphical images, called bit-maps, for the computer display. This memory is often dual-ported—a new image can be stored in it at the same time that its current data is being read and displayed.
It takes time to specify an address in a memory chip, and, since memory is slower than a CPU, there is an advantage to memory that can transfer a series of words rapidly once the first address is specified. One such design is known as synchronous DRAM (SDRAM), which became widely used by 2001.
Nonetheless, data transfer through the “bus”—the set of wires that connect the CPU to memory and peripheral devices—is a bottleneck. For that reason, CPU chips now contain cache memory—a small amount of fast SRAM. The cache holds copies of data from blocks of main memory. A well-designed cache allows up to 85–90 percent of memory references to be done from it in typical programs, giving a several-fold speedup in data access.
The time between two memory reads or writes (cycle time) was about 17 microseconds (millionths of a second) for early core memory and about 1 microsecond for core in the early 1970s. The first DRAM had a cycle time of about half a microsecond, or 500 nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and today it is 20 nanoseconds or less. An equally important measure is the cost per bit of memory. The first DRAM stored 128 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits) and cost about $10, or $80,000 per megabyte (millions of bytes). In 2001 DRAM could be purchased for less than $0.25 per megabyte. This vast decline in cost made possible graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the display fonts that word processors use, and the manipulation and visualization of large masses of data by scientific computers.

 

Secondary memory

Secondary memory on a computer is storage for data and programs not in use at the moment. In addition to punched cards and paper tape, early computers also used magnetic tape for secondary storage. Tape is cheap, either on large reels or in small cassettes, but has the disadvantage that it must be read or written sequentially from one end to the other.

IBM introduced the first magnetic disk, the RAMAC, in 1955; it held 5 megabytes and rented for $3,200 per month. Magnetic disks are platters coated with iron oxide, like tape and drums. An arm with a tiny wire coil, the read/write (R/W) head, moves radially over the disk, which is divided into concentric tracks composed of small arcs, or sectors, of data. Magnetized regions of the disk generate small currents in the coil as it passes, thereby allowing it to “read” a sector; similarly, a small current in the coil will induce a local magnetic change in the disk, thereby “writing” to a sector. The disk rotates rapidly (up to 15,000 rotations per minute), and so the R/W head can rapidly reach any sector on the disk.

 

 Early disks had large removable platters. In the 1970s IBM introduced sealed disks with fixed platters known as Winchester disks—perhaps because the first ones had two 30-megabyte platters, suggesting the Winchester 30-30 rifle. Not only was the sealed disk protected against dirt, the R/W head could also “fly” on a thin air film, very close to the platter. By putting the head closer to the platter, the region of oxide film that represented a single bit could be much smaller, thus increasing storage capacity. This basic technology is still used.

Refinements have included putting multiple platters—10 or more—in a single disk drive, with a pair of R/W heads for the two surfaces of each platter in order to increase storage and data transfer rates. Even greater gains have resulted from improving control of the radial motion of the disk arm from track to track, resulting in denser distribution of data on the disk. By 2002 such densities had reached over 8,000 tracks per centimetre (20,000 tracks per inch), and a platter the diameter of a coin could hold over a gigabyte of data. In 2002 an 80-gigabyte disk cost about $200—only one ten-millionth of the 1955 cost and representing an annual decline of nearly 30 percent, similar to the decline in the price of main memory.

 

 

• The DVD player uses a laser that is higher-powered and has a correspondingly finer focus point than …

Optical storage devices—CD-ROM (compact disc, read-only memory) and DVD-ROM (digital videodisc, or versatile disc)—appeared in the mid-1980s and '90s. They both represent bits as tiny pits in plastic, organized in a long spiral like a phonograph record, written and read with lasers. A CD-ROM can hold 2 gigabytes of data, but the inclusion of error-correcting codes (to correct for dust, small defects, and scratches) reduces the usable data to 650 megabytes. DVDs are denser, have smaller pits, and can hold 17 gigabytes with error correction.
Optical storage devices are slower than magnetic disks, but they are well suited for making master copies of software or for multimedia (audio and video) files that are read sequentially. There are also writable and rewritable CD-ROMs (CD-R and CD-RW) and DVD-ROMs (DVD-R and DVD-RW) that can be used like magnetic tapes for inexpensive archiving and sharing of data.
The decreasing cost of memory continues to make new uses possible. A single CD-ROM can store 100 million words, more than twice as many words as are contained in the printed Encyclopædia Britannica. A DVD can hold a feature-length motion picture. Nevertheless, even larger and faster storage systems, such as three-dimensional optical media, are being developed for handling data for computer simulations of nuclear reactions, astronomical data, and medical data, including X-ray images. Such applications typically require many terabytes (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes) of storage, which can lead to further complications in indexing and retrieval.