ABSTRACT
For most people, a computer is the familiar personal computer or its more portable equivalent, the laptop computer. These are intended for use in offices, laboratories and the home. They are used for handling data, for calculating, for communicating on the Internet and for playing games, among many other applications. The diagram below shows the main parts of a PC system:
The microprocessor is the heart of the system. It corresponds to the main processing units of a microcontroller, including the arithmetic logic unit. A microprocessor has to communicate with all other parts of the system. It needs many address lines, data lines and control lines, which function as described on p. 169. The newer microprocessors, such as the Intel Pentium 4, can address several gigabytes of memory and can handle 32-bit data. Some versions can handle 64-bit data. There are also many control lines. This means that the microprocessors need several hundred pins.
