Week 8

Week 8

This week we talked about modern hardware architecture and operators and operating systems. As Prof Heap went through the Von Neumann architecture of a CPU showing simple commands like load, add, store, etc., I realized all of the complex operations that a computer executes almost instantaneously.

We also learned that as computers get smaller they heat up considerably, and that Moore's Law will no longer apply. We speculated in class when Moore's Law would slow down, meaning that computers would not continually get smaller, but perhaps reach a plateau.

It was interesting to see how fragile a hard drive truly is. It's disconcerting to know that the head of the hard drive's actuator arm is "floating" in between the various discs of the hard drive. As Prof Heap mentioned, the mean time between failures (MTBF) of a hard drive is about 5 years. For someone who has a laptop from 2008, I think it's time to back up my hard drive...