Computer hardware

Yottabyte

A Yottabyte is approximately 1,000 Zettabytes. It would take approximately 11 trillion years to download a Yottabyte file from the Internet using high-power broadband. You can compare it to the World Wide Web as the entire Internet almost takes up about a Yottabyte.

Core

Each single processor circuit capable of fetching and executing instructions.

Brontobyte

A Brontobyte is approximately 1,000 Yottabytes. The only thing there is to say about a Brontobyte is that it is a 1 followed by 27 zeroes!

Geopbyte

A Geopbyte is about 1000 Brontobytes!.One way of looking at a geopbyte is 15267 6504600 2283229 4012496 7031205 376 bytes!

Petabyte

A Petabyte is approximately 1,000 Terabytes or one million Gigabytes. It's hard to visualize what a Petabyte could hold. 1 Petabyte could hold approximately 20 million 4-door filing cabinets full of text. It could hold 500 billion pages of standard printed text.

Exabyte

An Exabyte is approximately 1,000 Petabytes. Another way to look at it is that an Exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes or one billion Gigabytes. There is not much to compare an Exabyte to. It has been said that 5 Exabytes would be equal to all of the words ever spoken by mankind.

AND

The AND gate will only output a 1 if both inputs are 1, otherwise the output will be 0.

Bit

A Bit is the smallest unit of data that a computer uses. It can be used to represent two states of information, such as Yes or No.

Zettabyte

A Zettabyte is approximately 1,000 Exabytes. There is nothing to compare a Zettabyte to but to say that it would take a whole lot of ones and zeroes to fill it up.

Multi-core processor

A processor with more than one core (processor circuit) which means it can fetch and execute more than one instruction at a time.

Logic gates

Logic gates are the fundamental building blocks of digital circuits. There are three main logic gates: NOT, AND and OR

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

The main component of the computer. It carries out all the processing by fetching and executing instructions.

Fetch-Execute cycle

The process by which programs are run on a computer. The processor repeatedly fetches the instructions of the program from memory and executes them.

Boot program

The program that is used to start the computer. It is automatically loaded so that its instructions can be fetched when the computer is turned on, and it eventually loads the operating system.

Clock speed

The speed at which the processor carries out instructions, measured in Megahertz (MHz) or Gigahertz (GHz).

Byte

A Byte is equal to 8 Bits. A Byte can represent 256 states of information, for example, numbers or a combination of numbers and letters. 1 Byte could be equal to one character. 10 Bytes could be equal to a word. 100 Bytes would equal an average sentence.

CPU cache

Memory buffer on the processor that stores instructions which have been fetched before and allows them to be fetched more quickly the next time.

NOT

The NOT gate reverses the input, so if a 1 is inputted into a NOT gate it will output a 0.

OR

The OR gate will output 1 if either or both of the inputs are set to 1.

Gigabyte

A Gigabyte is approximately 1,000 Megabytes. A Gigabyte is still a very common term used these days when referring to disk space or drive storage. 1 Gigabyte of data is almost twice the amount of data that a CD-ROM can hold. But it's about one thousand times the capacity of a 3-1/2 floppy disk. 1 Gigabyte could hold the contents of about 10 yards of books on a shelf. 100 Gigabytes could hold the entire library floor of academic journals.

Kilobyte

A Kilobyte is approximately 1,000 Bytes, actually 1,024 Bytes depending on which definition is used. 1 Kilobyte would be equal to this paragraph you are reading, whereas 100 Kilobytes would equal an entire page.

Megabyte

A Megabyte is approximately 1,000 Kilobytes. In the early days of computing, a Megabyte was considered to be a large amount of data. These days with a 500 Gigabyte hard drive on a computer being common, a Megabyte doesn't seem like much anymore. One of those old 3-1/2 inch floppy disks can hold 1.44 Megabytes or the equivalent of a small book. 100 Megabytes might hold a couple volumes of Encyclopedias. 600 Megabytes is about the amount of data that will fit on a CD-ROM disk.

Terabyte

A Terabyte is approximately one trillion bytes, or 1,000 Gigabytes. To put it in some perspective, a Terabyte could hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images or maybe about 300 hours of good quality video. A Terabyte could hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ten Terabytes could hold the printed collection of the Library of Congress. That's a lot of data.