Topic-Supercomputers vs microprocessors
What is computer?
Acomputeris an electronic device that operates under the control of a set of instructions that is stored in its memory unit. A computer accepts data from an input device and processes it into useful information which it displays on its output device. Actually, a computer is a collection of hardware and software components that help you accomplish many different tasks.Hardwareconsists of the computer itself, and any equipment connected to it like I/O devices. Softwareis the set of instructions that the computer follows in performing a task.
Supercomputers:
The largest computers aresupercomputers. They are the most powerful, the most expensive, and the fastest. They are capable of processing trillions of instructions per second. The super computer is a title generally given to computers which have processing power greater than fastest mainframes and their main focus is on processing data and its manipulation. Supercomputers today often have a similar top-level architecture consisting of a cluster ofMIMD multiprocessors each processor of which is SIMD. Theirmemory hierarchyis very carefully designed to ensure that the processor is kept fed with data and instructions at all times. Mostly the performance difference between slower computers and supercomputers is due to the memory hierarchy. I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used fortransaction processing. Examples of users of these computers are governmental agencies, such as the IRS, the National Weather Service, and the National Defence Agency. They are also used in the making of movies, space exploration, and the design of many other machines.
->They have been developed from the processing requirements of advanced research projects by engineers, scientists and more recently by other research fields.
->the main cause behind their development is the need for calculating faster and faster calculations.
->They usually require specially built facilities and a large staff of computer technicians and computer engineers to maintain the hardware and software.
-> Theyare bigger in size so they take up largecabinetsor even a dedicated room.
->The base language of supercomputer code is FORTRANorC using special libraries to share data between nodes.
Microprocessors:
Amicroprocessor is a programmable integrated device that has computing and decision making capability similar to that of CPU.The microprocessor can be embedded in a larger system can be a standalone unit controlling processes or it can function as CPU of a computer called a microcomputer.The first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s and were used for electroniccalculators, usingbinary-coded decimal(BCD) arithmetic on 4-bitwords. Otherembeddeduses of 4- and 8-bit microprocessors, such asterminals,printers, various kinds ofautomationetc, followed rather quickly. Affordable 8-bit microprocessors with 16-bit addressing also led to the first general purposemicrocomputersin the mid-1970s.
Computer processors were for a long period constructed out of small and medium-scale ICs containing the equivalent of a few to a few hundred transistors. The integration of the whole CPU onto a single chip therefore greatly reduced the cost of processing capacity. From their humble beginnings, continued increases in microprocessor capacity have rendered other forms of computers almost completely obsolete with one or more microprocessor as processing element in everything from the smallest embedded systemsandhandheld devicesto the largestmainframesandsupercomputers.
Micro processors reads binary instructions from a storage device called memory, accepts binary data as input and processes data according to instructions and provides results as output.
Its memory is like pages of notebook with space for a fixed number of binary numbers on each line. Each line is an 8-bit register that can store 8 binary bits and many of these registers are arranged in sequence called memory. It uses both RAM and ROM.
The microprocessor is one component of the microcomputer.
