About Processing Hardware Architecture and System Architecture

6. Explain the various components of the CPU. Your discussion should include the CU, ALU, the various types of registers, and the relevance of the clock to the functioning of the CPU. (10 marks)

7. What purpose does the main memory of the computer serve? How does it relate to the hard drive? How does the size of the address bus impact on the size of memory (5 marks)

8. Explain how a simple low level program, say in assembly language, would work, and how the components of the processing hardware are involved. (10 marks)

9. What is “memory swapping”? (5 marks)

Operating System Architecture (30 marks)

10. What are the purposes of the operating system? (10 marks)

11. What is the BIOS? (5 marks)

12. What is a kernel? (5 marks)

13. What are “system calls” and how do they relate to the operating system, and also secure computing? (5 marks)

14. What happens in the boot process? Why should it work this way? (5 marks)