Exciting opportunity

Does property interest you? Do you like using your own initiative? If you are presentable, well spoken and educated to "0" level standard between 18-20 years old come and talk to us about an exciting career in a West London Estate agency.

Unit 6

1) Learn to recognize thee following international words.

Instruction, processor, technical, journal, start, revolutionary, poten­tially, programmer, minimum, command, function, chip, engineer, problem.

2) Read the following words.Pay attention to their pronunciation

Know, design, accept, circuitry, without, concept, associate, since, basic, answer, hardware, software, enormous.

3) Translate the following groups of words.

Computer design, reduced instruction set computer, design comp­lexity, hardware design, processor chip, processor circuitry, rise processor, processor design.

4) Read and translate the first part of the text.

A Good Reason to Take a Chance on risc

A new acronym has started, to appear in the technical computer journals. It' is being talked about, by those in the know, as the start of a revolutionary outlook on computer design. The acronym is RISC, and it stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer.

Why should a RISC computer be so revolutionary? The answer is that it is simpler and cheaper to make and potentially far faster and more powerful. For programmers its importance is that it transfers the design complexity away from hardware design and on to the software.

By reducing to the barest minimum the number of commands the processor will accept, and retaining only those necessary to perform the computer processing function, the designers of the processor chip can cut out a considerable part of the processor circuitry.

This has two results - the chip can be smaller and therefore much cheaper and because it is smaller, it can run faster without needing to use state-of-the-art technology.

This concept of processor design has allowed engineers to sidestep the enormous problems associated with the powerful 32-bit and up­ward microprocessors that use conventional Von Neumann archi­tecture.

Fewer instructions mean that the software for such processors is long. This is not a significant problem since more than 95 per cent of most programs consists of these basic instructions.. In most appli­cations a RISC processor can therefore run several times faster than a conventional processor.

5) Ask your group mates the following questions:

1) if a RISC computer is revolutionary.

2) why it is so important for programmers.

3) why the designers can cut out a considerable part of the processor circuity.

4) if the chip can be cheaper.

5) if a RISC processor can run much faster than a conventional processor.

6)Explain why:

1) a new acronym is being talked about as the start of a revolu­tionary outlook.

2) designers of the processor chip can cut out a considerable part of the processor circuitry.

3) engineers can sidestep big problems associated with conventional computers.

4) a RISC processor can run several times faster than a conventional processor.

7) Form as many words as possible using suffixes and prefixes. Define what parts of speech the new words are and translate them.

Know, manufacture, develop, produce, establish, power, appear, propose.

8) Read the second part of the text. Write down the translation of the text.

Acorn is well known to most people as the manufacturer of the ВВС computer. But it is little known as the developer of the ARM - Acorn RISC Machine. It has developed and produced in 18 months a power­ful 32-bit microprocessor. Running Basic, the processor can work at speeds almost 10 times faster than the IBM PC.

Because the chip is small and uses established technology, Acorn hopes to produce it for one-quarter of the price of other 32-bit micro­processors and is planning to use it in a new generation of cheap but powerful personal computers.

Britain is holding its own in the design of RISC processors, with three fully-developed systems. They are the Acorn ARM, the Inmos Transputer - a RISC machine with a sophisticated architecture - and a 32-bit RISC processor, the Viper, developed by the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern for military use.

But this may soon change. IBM has developed a RISC processor to put in a range or personal computers, the IBM RT series.

The IBM development appears to have been prompted by companies such as Acorn and Inmos - ironically, since the RISC concept was first proposed by researchers at IBM in the early 1970s.

9) Look through the following text and be ready to give the main ideas of the text.

Demand Lies with the High-quality Graphics Market The big market for RISC-based personal computers comes from people who need high-quality real-time graphics or powerful and fast number-crunching machines. In this group, are engineers, geologists, mathematicians, and economists - many of whom need machines for complex modeling.

The market-research firm Dataquest has estimated in a recent report that there are more than three million potential users for RISC computers in the US alone. If this is true, the technology can give manufacturers a substantial new market.

However, it could be that designing new RISC-based computers is not the best or quickest way into this new market. Inmos is appro­aching the problem in a different way. At a cost of between Ј 10,000 and Ј 15,000, the IBM PC can be upgraded to give a machine with a processing power of 50 million instructions a second, which out­performs many mainframe computers.

10) Try to speak of the following:

1) what specialists need high-quality RISC-based personal compu­ters.

2) what point of view the firm Dataquest has.

3) how Inmos is approaching this problem.