5. In reviewing the hardware components of computers from Chapter 1, the CPU nat
ID: 3905323 • Letter: 5
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5. In reviewing the hardware components of computers from Chapter 1, the CPU nates the movement of data from one place to another. Thus, each location (word or byte) is given a specific number (called an address or memory address) so the CPU can tell the main memory where to store or retrieve a specific piece of data. a) Early personal computers use 16-bit addresses, and this limited the size of the main memory to 65,536 bytes (65K). Why would a 16-bit address limit the main memory? b) How large can the main memory be with 32-bit addresses? c) How might a machine with 32-bit integers be able to interact with moderr storage devices that contain 1 terabyte (240 bytes) of storage? d) Several new computers utilize 64-bit integers, and 64-bit hardware is becoming more common over time. Could 64-bit architecture easily use storage devices with 1 terabyte (240 bytes) of storage? e) With advances in technology, future expansions of computer hardware to utilize 128-bit integers certainly will be possible. Do you think 128-bit integers will become common in computers of the future? Why or why not?Explanation / Answer
A) 16-bit address limit the size of main memory- First we need to understand, how we calculate the size of the main memory: 16 bit CPU indicates that 2^16 addressess are possible if each main memory cell holds a single machine word of size 16 bit. We call machine word as byteword also. So we have 2^16 bytewords. Since RAM addressing done in bytes and we also will represent the main memory size in bytes. After calculation it becomes (2^10*2^6)/2^10 = 64KB. Size of machine word is directly proportional to the size of main memory.
??B) Similarly we can calculate the main memory size with 32 bit address. With 32 bits address, we have total 2^32 possible addressess. 2^32 => (2^10*2^10*2^10*2^2) Bytes (Byteword) => (2^10*2^10*2^2)? KB => (2^10*2^2)MB => 4 GB
??C) Here storage device means secondary memory. For example - Hard Disk Drive. HDD contain sector and its addressing done sector wise. Each sector holds 512 bytes, so with 32 bit CPU we can have 2^32 sectors of size 512. That is how it supports 1 TB storage device.
D) Yes, 64 bit architecture could support 1TB or more sized storage devices.
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