CS-343 Assignment 1

Use whatever resources you can muster to answer the following questions.

1. What processor is used in the One Laptop Per Child project, and why is this controversial?
2. What processor is used in Macintosh computers? What processor was used previously?
3. What processor is used in IBM’s Blue Gene super computer?
4. What processor is used in the iPhone? Are you sure?
5. What is an ARM processor? Are there any products that actually use it?
6. What is a petaflop?
7. If you know how long someting is in feet, how do you convert that to inches?
8. If you know how much time something takes in nanoseconds, how do you convert that to picoseconds?
9. What is the period of a 4 GHz clock, in nanoseconds? In picoseconds? (Be sure to indicate which is which.)
10. What is the frequency of a sine wave with a 2.5 msec period?
11. How many bits would it take to encode the days of the week? Write out a possible coding scheme for this.
12. What is a “binary search” and what does it have to do with digital codes?
13. How many bytes are there in 1 GB of main (RAM) memory? Answer as a base raised to an exponent.
14. How many bytes are there in 1 GB of disk (HDD) memory? Answer as a base raised to an exponent.

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