This assignment is due by ELMS before the start of the class session indicated on the syllabus. Show your work, as it may provide an opportunity to receive partial credit.
Consider the specifications of a laptop that you might consider buying:
Processor type: Intel i7-8550U
Processor speed: 4.0 GHz
Word size: 64 bits
Cache: 8 MB
RAM: 16 GB, 2400 MHz access time
Hard drive: 2 TB, 17 ms access time, 35 MB/s transfer rate
Peripherals: External DVD-RW
To simplify calculations, you may assume that 1 megabyte is 1,000,000 (one million) bytes, 1 gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 (one billion) bytes, etc. (or you may use the exact values if you prefer).
Answer the following questions:
Now let's see how much stuff that hard drive can hold. Assume you have access to the following information for all 315 million people in the United States:
Name: 40 characters
Phone Number: 10 characters
SSN: 9 characters
taxes owed: one numeric value
Assume that each character is stored in one byte, and that each numeric value is stored in four bytes. Note that all of the values are stored as characters except the taxes owed. As this example illustrates, it is common to store numeric values when planning to perform numeric calculations, and to store characters in other cases (even when those characters are digits rather than letters).
Now let's see how long it would take to read that much data off the disk. Assume you have a hard drive large enough to store all the data.
Now assume instead (just for the sake of comparison) that it was possible to fit all of this data in RAM (regardless of whether or not that is really possible!).
Comparing those results, ...