Questions tagged [hardware]
Computer hardware is the collection of physical elements that comprise a computer system.
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How does the Base Address Registers (BARs) in a PCI card work?
I am trying to understand how the Base Address Registers (BARs) in a PCI card work, this is how I think they work:
Each function in a PCI card have 6 BAR fields, and each BAR field is
32-bit in size.
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Does the PCI bus only consists of the devices in the PCI slots? [closed]
I am learning about the PCI bus, and there is something that I am not sure of. A motherboard have some PCI slots to put the PCI cards in:
Now when we say that we have a PCI bus, do we mean that the ...
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Why does Mike Pound measure his computer's computational ability by its graphics cards, and not its processors?
I was recently watching a great Computerphile video on passwords in which Mike Pound brags of his company's supercomputer having 4 graphics cards (Titan X's, to be exact).
As a numerical simulation ...
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What does "data bus control" mean?
This video mentions the following:
What does it mean for the DMA controller to be granted the data bus control, does that mean the CPU cannot use the bus to access memory and IO devices until the DMA ...
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Can unsigned and signed (two's complement) multiplication be performed on the same hardware? [closed]
I know they can for addition and subtraction, but I'm not quite sure if they can for multiplication.
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How is it possible to have limitless availability of threads while only having a finite number of physical processing units?
So I'm having trouble understanding the relationship between threads (software) and processor cores (hardware).
Basically my understanding of a processor core is a unit that deals with commands and ...
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OO software design for interfacing hardware
My question is: How can I maximize encapsulation for wrapper-classes that interface with hardware.
The hardware is connected to a PC through COM-Ports or USB ports and I am either reading/writing to ...
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Quick wireless transmission
I'm looking for a way to send a signal between a raspberry pi and a smart phone. What I want to do is hash a few basic bits of information about the phone to use as a UUID. I then want to transmit ...
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How does a single thread run on multiple cores?
I am trying to understand, at a high-level, how single threads run across multiple cores. Below is my best understanding. I do not believe it is correct though.
Based on my reading of Hyper-threading,...
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Can the CPU manipulate the pins of an IO port directly?
Based on what I know so far, when you plug an IO device into an IO port (for example, when you plug a printer into a parallel port), the printer will be represented to the CPU as just another RAM chip....
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How data is accessed in Memory-Mapped I/O?
This is an example of Memory-Mapped I/O:
So basically you access the device controller registers through memory.
Now my question is, when you for example write to the memory location that maps to ...
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Can an IO device have some memory space or can it only have registers?
I am learning about IO devices, and so far I have only seen examples of IO devices that have registers and no memory space. For example, this is a printer that have three registers and no memory space:...
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Are "Control register" and "Status register" and "Data register" part of the device itself?
I am studying about Memory-Mapped I/O from here. I have read the following:
From the CPU's perspective, an I/O device appears as a set of
special-purpose registers, of three general types:
...
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Can a driver running in kernel mode access a port directly?
Based on what I know so far, if I want to create a driver, and want the driver to send data on some port (for example: serial/parallel/USB), my driver will communicate with the port driver, and the ...
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Why do device drivers in Linux need to run in kernel mode?
Say I have a device that is connected to the computer through a USB port, and I created an application to communicate with this device. In this application I used the USB driver to communicate with ...
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