New answers tagged computer-architecture
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Solving an ambiguity concerning unsigned and signed integers
As far as a CPU is concerned, everything is bits/bytes/words in memory. It doesn't "know" what the contents of a memory location means.
CPUs do have instructions that operate differently on (...
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translating operations per second (OPS) to floating point operations per second (FLOPS)
If you don't care too much about accuracy, FLOPS and OPS are roughly equivalent.
If you do care, then neither FLOPS nor OPS are precise enough.
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What is the difference between clock cycle and clock period?
First of all there is a distinction between clock cycle of a computer and central processing unit frequency. In general frequency and Time (i.e period) is directly related i.e 2 seconds is equivalent ...
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Is assembly macros part of operative system / kernel, or lower down and more seen as hardware?
You may be referring to the "macros" that can be defined when using a symbolic assembler for development. Such a program is a translator from a human readable representation of the processor ...
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translating operations per second (OPS) to floating point operations per second (FLOPS)
Processors without built-in floating point arithmetic usually require say 50 non-floating point operations to implement a floating point operations.
Processors with built-in floating point arithmetic ...
- 25.9k
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Is assembly macros part of operative system / kernel, or lower down and more seen as hardware?
Unfortunately the site you have been looking at has confused you by using the word "instructions" to mean two different things.
A machine instruction tells the machine to do something. For ...
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Why do computers become slow over time (HW PoV)?
As mentioned in the comments, this has many open ends but there are certain major aspects which could contribute to slowing down.
It comes down to physics. As you said heat. Heat does a lot more than ...
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