
BASICS OF COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE AND THE BINARY NUMBER SYSTEM 31
KEY POINTS OF THIS CHAPTER
A computer system consists of a CPU, memory and I/O which communicate with one
another through the system bus.
The system bus comprises the data bus, address bus and the control bus.
A processor’s activities are restricted to fetching, decoding and executing instructions.
For reading and writing from/to memory, a number of clock cycles of time are required.
The time expended for this is called the memory access time.
When comparing assembly language programming with high-level language program-
ming, we conclude that the former is faster in ex ...