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Computer hardware

Different buses and their uses

In computer architecture, a bus is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This expression covers all related hardware components (wire, optical fiber, etc.) and software, including communication protocols.

The internal bus, also known as internal data bus, memory bus, system bus or Front-Side-Bus, connects all the internal components of a computer, such as CPU and memory, to the motherboard. Internal data buses are also referred to as a local bus, because they are intended to connect to local devices. This bus is typically rather quick and is independent of the rest of the computer operations.

The external bus, or expansion bus, is made up of the electronic pathways that connect the different external devices, such as printer etc., to the computer.

Types and uses:

USB
Universal Serial Bus. Designed for: input devices, digital cameras, printers, media players...
Serial ATA
Used by internal storage devices (hard disk). They replace the old ATA connectors.
PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect, is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer. Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard itself or an expansion card that fits into a slot. Typical PCI cards used in PCs include: network cards, sound cards, modems, extra ports such as USB or serial, TV tuner cards and disk controllers.
PCI Express
Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (also called PCIe), is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-plug functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.
Mini PCIe
It is based on PCI Express technoogy. Main point is its small size and its large variety of connectors makes it used for USB2.0 cards, SIM card, Wifi and Bluetooth cards, 3G and GPS cards.
ExpressCard
It is an interface to connect peripheral devices to a computer, usually a laptop computer. ExpressCards can connect a variety of devices to a computer including mobile broadband modems, IEEE 1394 (FireWire) connectors, USB connectors, Ethernet network ports, Serial ATA storage devices, solid-state drives, external enclosures for desktop-size PCI Express graphics cards and other peripheral devices, wireless network interface controllers (NIC), TV tuner cards, Common Access Card (CAC) readers, and sound cards.

What are the differences between hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD)?

The traditional spinning hard drive (HDD) is the basic nonvolatile storage on a computer. Hard drives are essentially metal platters with a magnetic coating which stores the data. A read/write head on an arm accesses the data while the platters are spinning in a hard drive enclosure. An SSD does same jobas an HDD, but instead of a magnetic coating on top of platters, the data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data even when there's no power present. HDDs have spinning plates with magnetic coating, while SSDs have no moving parts and instead are using flash memory.

Attribute SSD (Solid State Drive) HDD (Hard Disk Drive)
Power Draw / Battery Life Less power draw, averages 2 – 3 watts, resulting in 30+ minute battery boost More power draw, averages 6 – 7 watts and therefore uses more battery
Cost Expensive, roughly $0.10 per gigabyte (based on buying a 1TB drive) Only around $0.06 per gigabyte, very cheap (buying a 4TB model)
Capacity Typically not larger than 1TB for notebook size drives; 1TB max for desktops Typically around 500GB and 2TB maximum for notebook size drives; 6TB max for desktops
Operating System Boot Time Around 10-13 seconds average bootup time Around 30-40 seconds average bootup time
Noise There are no moving parts and as such no sound Audible clicks and spinning can be heard
Vibration No vibration as there are no moving parts The spinning of the platters can sometimes result in vibration
Heat Produced Lower power draw and no moving parts so little heat is produced HDD doesn’t produce much heat, but it will have a measurable amount more heat than an SSD due to moving parts and higher power draw
Failure Rate Mean time between failure rate of 2.0 million hours Mean time between failure rate of 1.5 million hours
File Copy / Write Speed Generally above 200 MB/s and up to 550 MB/s for cutting edge drives The range can be anywhere from 50 – 120MB / s
Encryption Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Supported on some models Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Supported on some models
File Opening Speed Up to 30% faster than HDD Slower than SSD
Magnetism Affected? An SSD is safe from any effects of magnetism Magnets can erase data

What is the purpose of Flash Translation Layer in terms of solid state drives?

Flash drives have limited lifespan due to write cycles (or rather program-erase (PE) cycles) and to exhaust the drive equally, FTL layer is utilised.

Although presenting an array of Logical Block Addresses (LBA) makes sense for HDDs as their sectors can be overwritten, it is not fully suited to the way flash memory works. For this reason, an additional component is required to hide the inner characteristics of NAND flash memory and expose only an array of LBAs to the host. This component is called the Flash Translation Layer (FTL), and resides in the SSD controller. The FTL is critical and has three main purposes: logical block mapping, wear leveling and garbage collection.

The logical block mapping translates logical block addresses (LBAs) from the host space into physical block addresses (PBAs) in the physical NAND-flash memory space. This mapping takes the form of a table, which for any LBA gives the corresponding PBA.

Wear leveling (also written as wear levelling) is a technique[1] for prolonging the service life of some kinds of erasable computer storage media, such as flash memory (used in solid-state drives (SSDs) and USB flash drives).

The garbage collection process in the SSD controller ensures that “stale” pages are erased and restored into a “free” state so that the incoming write commands can be processed. If the data in a page has to be updated, the new version is written to a free page, and the page containing the previous version is marked as stale. When blocks contain stale pages, they need to be erased before they can be written to.


  • What are difference between volatile/non-volatile, RAM, ROM, EEPROM and where are they used?

What is data retention?

It is how long a device can hold data before it becomes unreadable.

  • What are difference between asynchronous/synchronous, dynamic/static RAM and where are they used?
  • What is cache? What is cache coherence?
  • What are differences between resistive and capacitive touchscreen? [1]

Explain how computer mouse works?

An optical computer mouse uses a light source, typically an LED, and a light detector, such as an array of photodiodes, to detect movement relative to a surface. Modern surface-independent optical mice work by using an optoelectronic sensor (essentially, a tiny low-resolution video camera) to take successive images of the surface on which the mouse operates. The technology underlying the modern optical computer mouse is known as digital image correlation. To understand how optical mice work, imagine two photographs of the same object except slightly offset from each other. Place both photographs on a light table to make them transparent, and slide one across the other until their images line up. The amount that the edges of one photograph overhang the other represents the offset between the images, and in the case of an optical computer mouse the distance it has moved. Optical mice capture one thousand successive images or more per second. Depending on how fast the mouse is moving, each image will be offset from the previous one by a fraction of a pixel or as many as several pixels. Optical mice mathematically process these images using cross correlation to calculate how much each successive image is offset from the previous one. History of computer mouse.

Storage abstractions

Bootloaders, kernels

  • What is the role of BIOS/UEFI in x86-based machines?
  • Explain step by step how operating system is booted up, see slides for flowchart.
  • Describe the functionality provided by general purpose operating system. See architecture of Windows NT, Android, OS X.
  • What are the main differences between real mode and protected mode of x86-based processor?
  • What happens during context switch?
  • What is the purpose of paged virtual memory?

Libraries, frameworks

Programming languages

Data encoding

  • What is bit? Nibble? Byte? Word?
  • Write 9375 in binary, hexadecimal?
  • Write 0xDEADBEEF in decimal?
  • What is quantization in terms of signal processing?
  • How are integers stored in binary? What integer range can be described using n bits? How many bits are required to describe integer range from n .. m.
  • How are single precision and double precision floating point numbers stored in binary according to IEEE754 standard? Floating-point multiplication
  • What is the difference between CMYK and RGB color models? How are YUV, HSV and HSL colorspaces related to RGB? What are sRGB and YCbCr and where are they used?
  • How is data encoded on audio CD-s? What is the capacity of an audio CD?
  • What is sampling rate? What is bit depth? What is resolution?
  • What is bitrate?
  • What is lossy/lossless compression?
  • What is JPEG suitable for? Is JPEG lossy or lossless compression method?
  • What is PNG suitable for? Does PNG support compression?
  • How are time domain and frequency domain related in terms of signal processing? What is Fourier transform and where it is applied?

Code execution in processor

  • Given ~10 instructions and their explainations, follow the instructions and elaborate after every step what happened in the processor?

Microcontrollers

  • What distinguishes microcontroller from microprocessor?
  • What are the differences between Hardvard architecture and von Neumann architecture?
  • What is an interrupt?
  • What is an timer?

Introduction to Boole algebra

  • Simplify A AND A OR B
  • Show addition of X and Y in binary
  • Show subtraction of X and Y in binary
  • Show multiplication of X and Y in binary

Hardware description languages

  • What are the uses for hardware description languages?
  • What is latch?
  • What is flip-flop?
  • What is mux (multiplexer)?
  • What is register? Register file?
  • What is ALU?
  • What is floating-point unit?
  • What is a cache?
  • What is a bus?
  • Show the circuit diagram for A OR B AND C, NOT A AND B, <insert some other Boole formula here>?
  • Show the truth table for <insert Boole formula here>?
  • Write the equivalent Boole formula of a circuit diagram.

Publishing work

  • What are the major implications of MIT, BSD and GPL licenses?
  • What are the differences between copyright, trademark, trade secret?
  • Where would you use waterfall software development model? Where would you use agile?
  • What is the purpose of a version control system?
  • What would you store in a version control system?

Algorithms and data structures

  • What is time complexity of algorithm?

In computer science, the time complexity of an algorithm quantifies the amount of time taken by an algorithm to run as a function of the length of the string representing the input. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by the algorithm, where an elementary operation takes a fixed amount of time to perform.

  • What is space complexity of algorithm?

Space complexity is a measure of the amount of working storage an algorithm needs. That means how much memory, in the worst case, is needed at any point in the algorithm. It represents the total amount of memory space that a "normal" physical computer would need to solve a given computational problem with a given algorithm.

  • What's a good algorithm?

History

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The observation is named after Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. As of 2015, the price had already reached about 14 billion US dollars.

  • What were the major contributing factors for success of Microsoft, Apple, Google, <your favourite company>?
  • What were the major contributing factors to the success of Silicon Valley?
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