Page 94 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

70 Chapter Two

3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of designing a proces-
sor with a built-in MCH?
4. What buses does a super I/O chip typically support?
5. Describe the differences between DRAM, SRAM, and SDRAM?
6. What are the important functions of the BIOS?
7. What is the difference between ATX and BTX motherboards?
8. Why is it convenient to a have separate oscillator for a real time
clock?
9. What is the purpose of the VID signals?
10. How does memory hierarchy improve performance?
11. How has the design of memory hierarchies changed over time?
12. [Lab] Open the case of a personal computer and identify the fol-
lowing components: motherboard, power supply, hard drive, expan-
sion cards, video adapter, main memory, chipset, and processor.
13. [Discussion] Looking at newspaper or magazine advertisement for
computer equipment, identify the different bus standards men-
tioned in describing the components.

Bibliography
Brey, Barry. INTEL Microprocessors 8086/8088, 80186/80188, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium,
Prentium ProProcessor, Pentium II, III, 4. 7th ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
2005.
Davis, Jim. “Apple Licensing FireWire for a Fee.” CNET News.Com, January 1999.
http://www.news.com.
Hennessy, John, David Patterson, and David Goldberg. Computer Architecture: A
Quantitative Approach. 3d ed., San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2002. [One of
the only books to show the result of memory hierarchy changes on real benchmarks.]
Mueller, Scott. Upgrading and Repairing PCs. 16th ed., Indianapolis, IN: Que Publishing,
2004. [The definitive work on PC hardware. This massive 1600-page book should be
sitting on the worktable of anyone who regularly opens up PCs.]
Norton, Peter, and Richard Wilton. The New Peter Norton Programmer’s Guide to the IBM
PC & PS/2. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1988. [The PS/2 is a distant memory, but
I still haven’t found a better book for going into the details of how PC BIOS works. As
the title says, this book is aimed at programmers rather than hardware engineers.]
“Sandpile.org: The World’s Leading Source for Pure Technical x86 Processor Information.”
http://www.sandpile.org.
Thompson, Robert and Barbara Thompson. PC Hardware in a Nutshell. Sebastopol, CA:
O’Reilly Publishing, 2003. [Another great PC hardware book. This book is a little less
detailed than Mueller’s work but perhaps a little more accessible to the beginner.]
White, Ron. How Computers Work. 6th ed., Indianapolis, IN: Que Publishing, 2002. [A fine
introduction to PC hardware for the layman. Great illustrations!]