Revisiting Egypt's Competitivness

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Question 1 (5 points)
How many cells can be in a computer's main memory if each cell's address can be represented by four hexadecimal digits? What if six hexadecimal digits are used? Explain your answer.

Question 2 (5 points)
Describe the fetch-decode-execute cycle of a microprocessor. Illustrate the steps using an example and include in your discussion, the role played by different registers like the program counter (PC) and the instruction register (IR), memory address register (MAR) etc. Highlight also the role played by the memory unit.

Question 3 (5 points)
Suppose that only 50GB of your personal computer’s 120GB hard-disk drive is empty. Which storage media would you use to backup your data? Explain your answer.

Question 4 (5 points)
Suppose a machine has 20GB of storage space available on a hard disk and receives data over a telephone connection at the rate of 14,400 bps. At this rate, how long would it take to fill the available storage space?

Question 5 (5 points)
Describe and illustrate the von Neumann architecture. Explain the relationship between the CPU,
ALU, control unit, bus, memory, registers and other peripheral devices.

Question 6 (5 points)
4.

Explain the differences between the following terms as they are used with storage systems. Use examples to illustrate your answer.
a)

Big endian memory

versus little endian memory

b)

PCI device versus SCSI device

c)

SRAM versus DRAM

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d)

CD pits versus CD lands

e)

Disk cylinder versus disk track

Question 7 (5 points)
A disk unit has 24 recording surfaces. It has a total of 14 000 cylinders. There is an average of
400 sectors per track. Each sector contains 512 bytes of data. What is the maximum number of bytes that can be stored in this unit?

Question 8 (5 points)
Company XYZ is required by law to keep a backup of all their electronic data for six years.
Discuss how they would go about backing up their data. Include in your