How Computers Represent Data

Number systems Binary number system

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Number system uses base 10 The number 123 represents ("**" represents exponentiation) 100+20+3 Each digit appearing to the left of the decimal point represents a value between zero and nine times an increasing power of ten. Digits appearing to the right of the decimal point represent a value between zero and nine times an increasing negative power of ten. For example, the value 123.456 means 1*102+2*101+3*100+4*10-1+5*10-2+6*10-3 100 + 20 + 3 + 0.4 + 0.05 + 0.006

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The Binary Numbering System

Most modern computer systems (including the IBM PC) operate using binary logic The computer represents values using two voltage levels (usually 0v and +5v). With two such levels we can represent exactly two different values. These could be any two different values, but by convention we use the values zero and one.

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The binary numbering system uses two digits 0 and 1 Binary uses powers of two rather than powers of ten. Therefore, it is very easy to convert a binary number to decimal. The binary value 11001010 represents 1*27+1*26+0*25+0*24+1*23+0*22+1*21+0*20 128 + 64 + 8 + 2 = 202 (base 10)

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Data Organization Computers work with some specific number of bits. Common collections are single bits, groups of four bits, groups of eight bits and groups of 16 bits Bit Nibble Byte word

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Bit the smallest unit of data on a binary computer is a single bit.

single bit is capable of representing only two different values (zero or one) Nibble is a collection of four bits. Byte consists of eight bits The bits in a byte are normally numbered from zero to seven using the convention shown below:

Bit 0 is the low order bit or least significant bit, bit 7 is the high order bit or most significant bit of the byte

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Byte also contains exactly two nibbles

Word is a group of 16 bits

bit 0 is the low order bit and bit 15 is the high order bit.

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A word contains exactly two bytes. Bits 0 through 7 form the low order byte, bits 8 through 15 form the high order byte:

A word may be further broken down into four nibbles

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Text codes Code which represent the letters of alphabet punctuation marks and other symbols Thus standard code enables to every program or programmer to use the same combination of numbers to represent the same piece of code Most popular code systems are EBCDIC ASSCII Extended ASCII Unicode

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American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ACSII)

ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127 Computers uses ASCII codes to represent text , which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another.
The standard ASCII character set uses just 7 bits for each character. which gives them 128 additional characters. The extra characters are used to represent non-English characters, graphics, symbols, and mathematical symbols. Several companies and organizations have proposed extensions for these 128 characters.

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Extended ASCII A set of codes that extends the basic ASCII set. The basic ASCII set uses 7 bits for each character giving it a total of 128 unique symbols. The extended ASCII character set uses 8 bits that specifies the characters for values from 128 to 255 First 40 symbols represents punctuation and special punctuation Remaining symbols are graphics symbols

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EBCIDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code 8 bit code that defines 256 symbols Used in IBM mainframe and midrange systems But now in personal computers Unicode the world wide character standard provides up to 4 bytes 32 bits to represent each letter ,number or symbol Unicode can be created to represent more than 4 billion different characters or symbols

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Coding systems for other type of data Graphics data Audio data Video data

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Inside the system unit

The main box of the computer that houses the CPU,motherboard,memory and other devices Inside the system unit components are Motherboard CPU Power supply CD\DVD drive Floppy drive Zip drive Expansion cards Expansion slots Memory Fan Hard drive

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The mother board

The main circuit board inside the system unit is called the mother board or system board A circuit board is a thin board containing chips Very small pieces of silicon or other semi-conducting material Integrated circuits or other electronic components are connected to it External devices (monitors and printers )connect to the mother board by plugging into a special connector called a port exposed through a exterior of the system unit case The port is either connected directly to the mother board or is connected through an expansion card plugged in to an expansion slots on the mother board

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CPU
The central processing unit Also referred as processor A CPU for a microcomputer is referred to as a microprocessor It consists of variety of components packaged together and plugged directly into the mother board Most PCs use CPUs manufactured by Intel or Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Desktop PCs include Intel Pentium 4 and the AMD Athlon XP Home PCs use a Celeron CPU Portable computers use either desktop PC CPU or similar processors designed for portable PC use Intel Pentium M Server use more powerful processors such as Intels Xeon and Itanium 2 AMDs Opteron and Athlon MP and sun ultra SPARC processors Apple Macintosh computers use power pc processors CPUs were developed through a cooperative effort by Apple,Motrola,and IBM The type of CPU chip in a computers system unit greatly affects what can be done with that pc

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Processing (clock) speed

Processing speed also known as clock speed Clock speed indicates no of ticks of the system clock occur per second Clock speed is rated in megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz GHz) million or billion of ticks per second respectively A higher clock speed means that more instructions can be processed per second than the same CPU with a lower clock speed P-4 microprocessor running at 3.06 GHz would be faster than a p-4 running at 2.8 GHz if all components remained the same CPUs for the earliest PCs ran at less than 5 MHz Fastest CPUs run at more than 3GHz Performance speed is the important factor in computer performance

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Word size
Amount of data measured in bits or bytes that a cpu can manipulate at one time Different CPUs may have different word sizes A larger word size allows faster processing in a computer system Newer CPUs are designed for 64-bit (words) it means data moves around within the CPU and from the CPU to memory in 64-bit (8 byte) Bus width and speed A bus is an electronic path within a computer over which data can travel Bus width The no of wires in the bus over which data can travel The wider the bus has the more data can be transferred at one time

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Bus Types
Internal bus System bus Front side bus Backside bus Internal bus moves data around the CPU System bus moves data back and forth between the CPU and memory Front side bus (FSB) specific system bus to connect the CPU to RAM Backside bus (BSB) transfers data between the CPU and the external cache Many CPUs have 64-bit internal bus and system buses

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