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While a computer program is a passive collection of instructions typically stored in a file on disk, a process is the execution of those instructions after being loaded from the disk into memory. Several processes may be associated with the same program; for example, opening up several instances of the same program often results in more than ...
If needed, contents of the computer memory can be transferred to storage; a common way of doing this is through a memory management technique called virtual memory. Modern computer memory is implemented as semiconductor memory, [5] [6] where data is stored within memory cells built from MOS transistors and other components on an integrated ...
In computer engineering, instruction pipelining is a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. Pipelining attempts to keep every part of the processor busy with some instruction by dividing incoming instructions into a series of sequential steps (the eponymous "pipeline") performed by different processor units with different parts of instructions ...
Each computer's CPU can have different cycles based on different instruction sets, but will be similar to the following cycle: Fetch stage: The fetch stage initiates the instruction cycle by retrieving the next instruction from memory. During this stage, the PC is polled for the address of the instruction in memory (using the MAR).
A cache is a smaller, faster memory, closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations. Most CPUs have different independent caches, including instruction and data caches, where the data cache is usually organized as a hierarchy of more cache levels (L1, L2, L3, L4, etc.).
A request to the OS is usually in the form of a system call, (i.e. a call from the running process to a function that is part of the OS code). For example, a process might become BLOCKED if it is requesting a file from disk or a saving a section of code or data from memory to a file on disk.
In computer operating systems, memory paging (or swapping on some Unix-like systems) is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage [a] for use in main memory. [1] In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called pages.
In computing, multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD) is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processor cores that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be executing different instructions on different pieces of data.