Evolution of Computer Technology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Evolution of Computer Technology - Essay Example By doing so the CPU is never idle and optimizes the use of resources. It is a combination of various scalar and vector processing which is responsible for Instruction level parallelism within a single processor. It executes more than one instruction during a clock cycle. It also includes pipelining and makes sure that instructions are taken from a sequential stream are dynamically checked for dependencies between instructions. It enhances the speed of the computer by executing in the following manner: It is a concept where several jobs would run parallel using the common processing resources like CPU and memory. It switches from one job to another taking the processes to execute simultaneously the tasks. This switching is called context switching. The security aspects of multitasking would be the ability of a process to impact inadvertently or deliberately overwrite memory allocation that belongs to another program. The complexity of various operations would make sure that memory requires to be protected from other processes and can be done using semaphores. The semaphores employ two basic functions namely wait and signal to synchronize the process operation and functioning. It allows concurrent access of the processes to memory resources for direct access and control. The memory management schemes involve garbage collection which is more dependent on various memory allocation and release methods for removing objects from memory. Researchers at Xerox PARC have developed a powerful formal model for describing the parameter spaces for collectors that are both generational and conservative. A garbage collection becomes a mapping from one storage state to another. They show that storage states may be partitioned into threatened and immune sets. The method of selecting these sets induces a specific garbage collection algorithm. A pointer augmentation provides the formalism for modeling remembered sets and imprecise pointer identifications. Finally, they show how the formalism may be used to combine any generational algorithm with a conservative one. They used the model to design and then implement two different conservative generational garbage collectors. Their Sticky Mark Bit collector uses two generations and promotes objects surviving a single coll ection. A refinement of this collector (Collector II) allows objects allocated beyond an arbitrary point in the past to be immune from collection and tracing. This boundary between old objects, which are immune, and the new objects, which are threatened, is called the threatening boundary. More recently, these authors have received a software patent covering their ideas. Any type of dynamic storage allocation system imposes both CPU and memory costs. The costs often strongly affect the performance of the system and pass directly to the purchaser of the hardware as well as to software project schedules. Thus, the selection of the appropriate storage management technique will often be determined primarily by its costs. Cache memory: It is a faster and speedier memory which is placed between the CPU and the main memory and is