17.1 Прочитай текст how microprocessors work, переведи и заполни пропуски следующими словами: tiny; items; task; decisions; purpose; switches; path­ways; helpful:

Today’s microprocessors are the brains of your personal com­puter. Here, on this _ silicon chip are millions of _ and _ that help your computer make important _ and perform _ tasks. You might find a processor in many everyday _ like your telephone or car. To help you understand how the microproces­sor does its job, you will go step by step through a simple task on the chip. For the _ of this demonstration, you will add two numbers together. You will complete this _ in four easy steps and you may review each step as many times as you want. Remember, each part of the processor has a special task.

17.2 Прочитай, переведи текст some definitions they use и расположи абзацы в правильной последовательности:

1. A data base is a collection of interrelated data stored together with minimum redundancy. Specific data items can be retrieved for various applications.

2. Whenever a change is to be made to stored data, a record is generated containing the new data. The record is called a transac­tion.

3. A record is a unit of data representing a particular transaction or a basic element of a file consisting, in turn, of a number of inter­related data elements.

4. Data is the raw material to be processed by a computer. Such material can be letters, numbers, or facts — such as grades in a class, baseball batting averages, or light and dark areas in a photograph. Processed data becomes information — data that is organized, mean­ingful, and useful.

5. To be processed by the computer, raw data must be organized into characters, fields, records, files, and data bases.

6. A field contains an item of data. A subdivision of a record con­taining a unit of information.

7. A character is a set of symbols, a letter, number, or special char­acter (such as $, ?, or *). One or more characters comprise a field. Each character is represented by a unique code.

8. Now let us give specific definitions.

9. A file is a collection of related records. The relationship be­tween records on a file may be that of common parties, format or data source.

17.3 Прочитай и письменно переведи текст is there an end to the computer race?:

Computers capable of performing billions of operations a second are required for nationwide management of the economy. It was demonstrat­ed by the prominent Soviet scientist, Academician Victor Glushkov.

Together with his teacher, Academician Sergei Lebedev, and other scientists, he suggested ways to achieve such computer speeds. Nature also suggested what path to follow — the scientists succeeded “only” in understanding it. At a congress in Stockholm in 1974 they shared their ideas with colleagues from other countries. Since then the work on su­percomputers has gained pace in all laboratories and design offices.

They are different from ordinary computers primarily, as special­ists put it, in architecture. The ordinary computer does the computa­tions sequentially — operation by operation, while the supercomputer operates like brain: all the computations proceed concurrently. A ma­jor problem, roughly speaking, is split up into minor ones, and indi­vidual parts of the computer, the processors, do the computations si­multaneously. During the activities (if required) and at the end of them the computation results are “drained”. This can be roughly compared with a tank from which water previously flowed out by one pipe and then from a multitude of pipes — so the tank empties out much faster.

Qualitatively, new integrated circuits were required to develop such a computer. They are now the basic component of the Soviet Elbrus super­computers. It is a whole family of superhigh-capacity machines comput­ing at a speed up to 125 million operations a second. The computation speed is even ten times as fast with a number of special operations.

In the next few years, the team is to complete the work on computers with a capacity of above one billion operations a second. It will take a few more years to produce computers with a speed of over 10 billion opera­tions a second. The road to electronic giants is open: fifth-generation com­puters performing 100 billion operations a second are likely to become available in the foreseeable future. Is there an end to this relay race?

According to an American researcher, we are close to what can be regarded as a true physical limit.

Other specialists regret the sluggishness of electrons. In their opin­ion, photons - light particles - will permit the performance to be made a thousand times faster.

This would mean that in the future we can expect the emergence of photon computers and that computations will be done by means of light. At least this is what is being hypothesized at present.