221 chapter 6

1. A system bus connects computer system components, including the CPU, memory, storage, and I/O devices.

True

2. A system bus can be conceptually or physically divided into specialized subsets, including the data, address, control, and power buses.

True

7. Peer-to-peer bus protocols are substantially less complex but more expensive than master-slave bus protocols.

false

9. Secondary storage devices are much faster than the system bus.

false

29. Using data compression alters the balance of processor resources and communication or storage resources in a computer system.

true

30. MP3 compresses the audio data stream by discarding information about masked sounds or representing them with fewer bits.

true

5. Serial channels in buses are more reliable than parallel channels at very high speeds.

true

8. The memory bus has a much higher data transfer rate than the system bus because of its shorter length, higher clock rate, and (in most computers) large number of parallel communication lines.

true

11. The CPU communicates with a peripheral device by moving data to or from an I/O port's dedicated bus.

false

13. A buffer for an I/O device is typically implemented on the sending computer.

false

16. One way to limit wait states is to use an SDRAM cache between the CPU and SRAM primary storage.

false

19. A full-featured 64-bit CPU, even one with multiple ALUs and pipelined processing, typically requires fewer than 50 million transistors.

false

21. Multiple-processor architecture is not common in workstations.

false

24. The largest computational problems, such as those encountered in modeling three-dimensional physical phenomena, can be solved by a single computer as long as it has enough computing resources.

false

26. Reducing the size of stored or transmitted data can improve performance whenever there's a dearth of processing power.

false

28. Lossless compression ratios higher than 50:1 are difficult or impossible to achieve with audio and video data.

false

3. With serial communication lines in a bus, each line carries only one bit value or signal at a time, and many lines are required to carry data, address, and control bits.

false

4. Until the 2000s, system buses were always constructed with serial electrical lines.

false

6. Performance is improved if storage and I/O devices can transmit data between themselves with explicit CPU involvement.

false

10. Devices with low data transfer demand can use a single PCI bus lane, and devices with higher requirements can increase their available data transfer rate by using additional lanes.

true

12. A PC usually transmits data one bit at a time over a wireless connection, and a laser printer prints an entire page at once.

true

14. During a write operation, a cache acts similarly to a buffer.

true

15. Data written to a cache during a write operation isn't automatically removed from the cache after it's written to the underlying storage device.

true

17. Disk caching is common in modern computer systems, particularly in file and database servers.

true

18. The OS is the best source of file access information because it updates information dynamically as it services file access requests.

true

20. When multiple processors occupy a single motherboard, they share primary storage and a single system bus.

true

22. Both multicore and multiple-processor architectures are examples of scaling up because they increase the power of a single computer system.

true

23. Until the 1990s, scaling up was almost always a more cost-effective strategy to increase available computer power because communication between computers was extremely slow compared with communication between a single computer's components.

true

25. People routinely download megabytes or gigabytes of data via the Internet and store gigabytes of data on handheld devices, terabytes on desktop computers, and petabytes to exabytes in corporate and government data centers.

true

27. Zip files and archives are examples of lossless compression.

true