Computer architectureIn computer science, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation. The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine.
Minimal instruction set computerMinimal instruction set computer (MISC) is a central processing unit (CPU) architecture, usually in the form of a microprocessor, with a very small number of basic operations and corresponding opcodes, together forming an instruction set. Such sets are commonly stack-based rather than register-based to reduce the size of operand specifiers. Such a stack machine architecture is inherently simpler since all instructions operate on the top-most stack entries.
IBM System/370The IBM System/370 (S/370) is a model range of IBM mainframe computers announced on June 30, 1970, as the successors to the System/360 family. The series mostly maintains backward compatibility with the S/360, allowing an easy migration path for customers; this, plus improved performance, were the dominant themes of the product announcement. In September 1990, the System/370 line was replaced with the System/390. The original System/370 line was announced on June 30, 1970, with first customer shipment of the Models 155 and 165 planned for February 1971 and April 1971 respectively.
Explicitly parallel instruction computingExplicitly parallel instruction computing (EPIC) is a term coined in 1997 by the HP–Intel alliance to describe a computing paradigm that researchers had been investigating since the early 1980s. This paradigm is also called Independence architectures. It was the basis for Intel and HP development of the Intel Itanium architecture, and HP later asserted that "EPIC" was merely an old term for the Itanium architecture. EPIC permits microprocessors to execute software instructions in parallel by using the compiler, rather than complex on-die circuitry, to control parallel instruction execution.
Intel 8051The Intel MCS-51 (commonly termed 8051) is a single chip microcontroller (MCU) series developed by Intel in 1980 for use in embedded systems. The architect of the Intel MCS-51 instruction set was John H. Wharton. Intel's original versions were popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, and enhanced binary compatible derivatives remain popular today. It is a complex instruction set computer, but also has some of the features of RISC architectures, such as a large register set and register windows, and has separate memory spaces for program instructions and data.
Benchmark (computing)In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. The term benchmark is also commonly utilized for the purposes of elaborately designed benchmarking programs themselves. Benchmarking is usually associated with assessing performance characteristics of computer hardware, for example, the floating point operation performance of a CPU, but there are circumstances when the technique is also applicable to software.
