Describe how concepts such as RISC, pipelining, cache memory, and virtual memory have evolved over the past twenty-five years to - Research Paper Example

In different scenarios the notations for representation of time are different like turnaround time, waiting time and response time. Time efficient algorithms are not space efficient usually due to time/space trade off. These algorithms may prove to be heavier for the hardware in terms of their need for storage space they require to execute. In case of computer hardware the representation of time and space for performance evaluation can be seen in terms of processor speed, bus speed, memory access latency, throughput and the size of storage space accordingly. It has been observed historically that advancement in computer hardware and software always go hand in hand in order to cope up with the requirements of each other. The advent of semi conductor memory introduced the capability of memory addressing, memory segmentation and memory fencing through fence registers. This created the capacity of multiprogramming with memory security against old fashioned batch processing systems. Multiprogramming later evolved into timesharing and facilitated processor sharing. The huge sizes of peripheral devices and offline operations were replaced by the invention of miniaturized controllers with local buffers. This revolutionized the co-existence of peripheral devices through techniques of spooling and DMA. ...
This technique went obsolete due to programming restrictions and enormous sized program code. The concept of virtual memory appeared as a solution to this problem. The fact that has been continuously observed during the evolution of computing was, that with the implementation of new and advance techniques to address old problems the room of improvement in the performance of the computing systems remained persistent. The new solutions in turn produced new problems and this cycle goes on. For example to address the problem of incompatibility between the sizes of physical memory and program code, the concept of virtual memory and the techniques of paging and demand paging were introduced. These in turn resulted in multiple problems like, Access latency due to the involvement of secondary storage. Memory allocation for oversized page tables for which different strategies like multi level paging, inverted page tables and hashed page tables were applied (These have their drawbacks too). The involvement of cache as TLB to reduce access latency. Frame allocation and page replacement strategies and their drawbacks. Thrashing etc. The improvement capacity always coexisted with the upcoming solutions and increasing requirements. The last few decades saw the advent of some remarkable achievements like the RISC architecture, pipelining, cache, super scalar processing, memory management systems and virtual memory. The computational power increased manifolds as a result of these achievements. Referring to “Reduced instruction set computing” The type of computer architecture that involved simple instructions that were comprehensive and lesser in number. RISC incorporated registers along with the main memory itself for the Read More