Hardware

How Computers Remember February 20, 2019 by thepigeonfighter A brief explanation of Computer Memory In the last post I explained how the ALU in your CPU works. As impressive as that is it doesn’t do very much good unless you can store the results. Which brings us to the problem of how can computers store memory. In general there are two types of memory that most computers employ. There is temporary memory and persistent memory. We will be spending our time explaining the temporary memory. Suffice it to say that persistent memory are things that are written to your hard drive or other storage device. Whereas the bulk of temporary memory is stored in your RAM(Random Access Memory). The difference is that when the power is removed from your RAM all the memory is effectively lost. With hard drives on the other hand the data persists even without power. ...

The ALU February 3, 2019 by thepigeonfighter The Arithmetic-Logic Unit All of mathematics solved with six bits. The ALU is the work-horse in the CPU. It is responsible for almost all computations. In previous posts I have described building various kinds of chips that have somewhat simple functionality. Each chip was required to have a specific behavior that can be repeated giving the same result every time. The last chip I described which was the Full-Adder was the first chip that had some immediate mathematical utility. Well this is the post where we bring everything together to create the most complicated chip we have made thus far, which will be able to do the following : ...