ASSIGNMENT # 2 Order of Magnitude

Orders of Magnitude

(1) 64 K = 64 kilobytes
1GB = 1 gigabytes = (1024) (1024)kilobytes

(1024)(104) K/(64K) = 16384
Therefore, today's computers have 16 384 times more of memory.

(2)Memory of a double sided floppy disk = 800K
Memory of a DVDs =4.7GB

= 4.7 (1024 ) ( 1024)K
= 4928307.2K
4928397.2K/800K = 6160.384
Therefore, there will be approximately 6 160 floppy disks are equivalent to one 4.7GB DVD.

(3) A lot of information is available on internet regarding the history of development of the speed of the processor of computer.Following links may help.

http://www.willus.com/archive/timeline.shtml
http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/~stephen/history/microprocessor.html
http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/~stephen/history/timeline-CP

In early 70s, the Intel processor's rate was 108KHz , approximately 0.06 MIP (Million Instructions Per Second) Pentium II 333MHz today runs at 770 MIP. AMD released the Phenum X4 9750 running at 2.4 GHz and 9850 running at 2.5 GHz. Intel released Xeons, the L5400 series, running up to 2.5 GHz. Today's computers are running more than 12833 MIP times faster.

The original IBM PC (c. 1981) had a clock rate of 4.77 MHz (4,770,000 cycles/second)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_rate)

An IBM PC with an Intel 486 CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast as one with the same CPU, memory and display running at 25 MHz, while the same will not be true for MIPS R4000 running at the same clock rate as the two are different processors with different functionality.The clock rate of the RAM, the width in bits of the CPU's bus and the amount of Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 cache.

Computers today boast processor clock rates which are superior to the original IBM PC (circa 1981) clock rate of 4.77MHZ. My iBook G4 (2004), for example, has a processor speed of 1.07 GHZ.