A Glossary of Computer Architecture (Cont.)


A few terms of computer architecture are given below (cont.):
CPU (Central Processing Unit)
It is the “brain” of the computer that fetches, decodes, and executes instructions.

GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
It is a specialized processor with many smaller, efficient cores designed for massive parallel processing.

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)
It is a parallel computing platform and programming model created by NVIDIA. It allows developers to use high-level languages like C/C++ to harness the GPU.

Four computer architecture categories

  • SISD (Single Instruction, Single Data), which means a single processor that executes one instruction at a time on a single piece of data

  • SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data), which means a single control unit that broadcasts the same instruction to multiple processing elements, which execute it on different pieces of data simultaneously.

  • MISD (Multiple Instruction, Single Data), which means multiple processors execute different instructions on the same, single data stream.

  • MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data), which means multiple processors execute completely different instructions on independent data sets simultaneously



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      ― Phyllis Diller