Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The Difference Between Computer Organization and Computer Architecture

Computer organization
  • Deals with all physical components of computer systems that interacts with each other to perform various functionalities
  • The lower level of computer organization is known as microarchitecture which is more detailed and concrete.
  • Examples of Organizational attributes includes Hardware details transparent to the programmer such as control signal and peripheral.

Computer architecture

  • Refers as a set of attributes of a system as seen by programmer
  • Examples of the Architectural attributes include the instruction set,the no of bits used to represent the data types,Input Output mechanism and technique for addressing memories

The difference between architecture and organization is best described by a non-computer example. Is the gear level in a motorcycle part of it is architecture or organization? The architecture of a motocycle is simple; it transports you from A to B. The gear level belongs to the motorcycle's organization because it implements the function of a motorcycle but is not part of that function

ASCII CODES

Computer is a system that can only understand numbers. So because of that, to make an easier of using computer ASCII codes has been created and represents all the letters in the roman alphabet plus some additional characters. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another. ASCII is pronounced "ask-ee" which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a set of characters of the english alphabet. There have two types of ASCII which is Standard and Extended ASCII. Characters 0 through 127 comprise the Standard ASCII Set and characters 128 to 255 are considered to be in the Extended ASCII Set. Knowing something about ASCII can be helpful.

Standard ASCII table

* This panel is organized to be easily read in hexadecimal:
  • Row numbers represent the first digit
  • Column numbers represent the second one.




Unicode

Unicode was created in august 1987 by joe becker with lee collin and mark davis from a company called apple. They were investigating the problems of how multiple languages or other special characters can be implemented by using computer. Here , unicode is used to manipulate text expressed in the most of the world's writing systems. It can be implemented by different character of coodings.Unicode also can be used to translate texts in multiple languages, special fonts and browsing softwares. The difference between ASCII and unicode is unicode more to languages, emoticons, or special fonts while ASCII is more to characters or input that comes from the keyboard.

Examples of unicode in 8 bit HTML using 'character entities', for instance:

  • = ॐא
  • = א‎Ω = Ω