Components of System Unit

Instructor: Nisar Ahmed

System Unit
A box like case that houses the electronic components of the computer, e.g. storage devices, CPU, memory etc. Some units sit on the top of desk called Desk Top, while others stand vertically known as Tower Models. A note book is an All-in-one computer, housing all the components including system unit, monitor, keyboard etc.

The Motherboard
Also called System Board is the main circuit board in the SU which holds many different types of chips including Microprocessor (CPU).

Central Processing Unit

Often called a processor, interprets and carries out the basic instructions that operate a computer. It manages most of the computer operations e.g. communication with external devices etc. CPU contains CU, ALU, and MU. These component work together to perform processing.

Control Unit
The control unit directs the flow of data through the CPU, to and from other devices, playing a role much like a traffic cope. It interprets each instruction issued by a program and then initiates the appropriate action to carry out the instruction It repeats a set of four basic operations for each instruction: 1. Fetch 2. Decode 3. Execute 4. Store (if necessary)

Instruction Fetch
Process of acquiring program instruction or data from memory.

System Clock
Imagine the role of heart beat, which is to keep body functioning. Similarly system clock (electronic chip) synchronizes or controls the timing of all the computer operations. It generates the regular electronic pulses or ticks, that set the operating pace of components. Each tick is called a Clock Cycle. Early CPUs used one or more clock cycles to execute an instruction. Superscalar CPUs can execute more than one instruction per clock cycle.

Clock Speed (Clock Rate)

The rate/speed at which a processor executes instructions. Faster the clock, the more instructions CPU can execute per second. Clock speed is stated in Mega and Giga hertz. HERTZ: one cycle per second. A CPU having clock rate of 1GHz is faster than the CPU have clock rate of 800MHz. System clock only affects the CPU not the peripherals such as printers, disk drives and others.

Name P-IV Itanium P-III Xeon Athlon Duron AMD-K6 III Celeron P-II Xeon AMD K6 II AMD K6 P-II Pentium MMX

Date Introduced 2000 2000 1999 1999 1999 1999 1998 1998 1998 1998 1997 1997

Manufacturer Intel Intel Intel AMD AMD AMD Intel Intel AMD AMD Intel Intel

Clock Speed 1.4G and Up 800M and up 500M-1G 500M-1.2G 600-800M 400-450M 266-800M 400-450M 366-550M 300M 234-450M 166-233M

Number of Transistors 42 Million 25.4-60M 9.5-28M 22-37M 18M 21.3M 7.5-19M 7.5-27M 9.3M 8.8M 7.5M 4.5M