2006-12-10 05:24:27 · 3 answers · asked by bernieEC 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Other - Computers
Computer architecture is the designing of a computersystem that describes how the computer operates.
In computer engineering, computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements (especially speeds and interconnections) and design implementations for the various parts of a computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs internally and accesses addresses in memory.
It may also be defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals.
"Architecture" therefore typically refers to the fixed internal structure of the CPU (i.e. electronic switches to represent logic gates) to perform logical operations, and may also include the built-in interface (i.e. opcodes) by which hardware resources (i.e. CPU, memory, and also motherboard, peripherals) may be used by the software.
More specific usages of the term include:
The design of a computer's CPU architecture, instruction set, addressing modes, and techniques such as SIMD and MIMD parallelism.
More general wider-scale hardware architectures, such as cluster computing and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures.
The set of machine attributes that a programmer should understand to successfully program the computer. Parts of the architecture are the instructions and the width of operands. The system frequency (e.g. 1 GHz) is not part of the architecture.
2006-12-10 05:29:29 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
This refers to the type of processor in the computer. i386 is the architecture for Intel 80386, 80486, and first and second generation Pentium processors. i686 is the latest generation of Pentiums. Then there's also AMD64, Itanium, Sparc, Alpha, etc.
2006-12-10 05:30:20 · answer #2 · answered by clefmeister 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
hardware is refering to the actual items like you cd drive, hard drive, graphics card, memory stick, etc. software is the program that is on the cd. Hope it helps.
2016-05-23 02:21:58 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋