Classification

of computers
 Classification Of
Computer

Until recently computers were classifieds as microcomputers,

super minicomputers, mainframes, and supercomputers.
Technology, however, has changed and this classification is no
more relevant. Today all computers used microprocessors as
their CPU. Thus classification is possible only through their
mode of use. Based on mode of use we can classify computers
as Palms, Laptop PCs, Desktop PCs and Workstations. Based on
interconnected computers we can classify computers we can
classify them as distributed computers and parallel computers.
 Palm PCs or Simputer

With miniaturization and high-density packing of

transistor on a chip, computers with capabilities
nearly that of PCs which can be held in a palm have
emerged. Palm accept handwritten inputs using an
electronic pen which can be used to write on a Palms
screen (besides a tiny keyboard), have small disk storage and can be
connected to a wireless network. One has to train the system on the
users handwriting before it can be used as a mobile phone, Fax, and e-
mail machine. A version of Microsoft operating system called Windows-CE
is available for Palm.An Indian initiative to meet the needs of rural
population of developing countries is called Simputer. Simputer is a
mobile handheld computer with input through icons on a touch sensitive
overly on the LCD display panel. A unique feature of Simputer is the use
of free open source OS called GNU/Linux. The cost of ownership is thus
low as there is no software cost for OS. Another unique feature of
Simputer not found in Palm, is a smart card reader/writer, which increases
the functionality of the Simputer including possibility of personalization of
a single Simputer for several users.
 Laptop PCs:

Laptop PCs (also known as notebook computers) are portable

computers weighing around 2 kgs. They have a keyboard,
flat screen liquid crystal display, and a Pentium or Power PC
processor. Colour displays are available. They normally run
using WINDOWS OS. Laptops come with hard disk (around 40
GB), CDROM and floppy disk. They should run with batteries
and are thus designed to conserve energy by using power
efficient chips. Many Laptops can be connected to a network.
There is a trend towards providing wireless connectivity to
Laptops so that they can read files from large stationary
computers. The most common use of Laptop computers is
used for word processing, and spreadsheet computing. As
Laptops use miniature components which have to consume
low power and have to be packaged in small volumes.
 Personal Computers
(PCs)
The most popular PCs are desktop machines. Early PCs had Intel
8088 microprocessors as their CPU. Currently (2004), Intel Dual
Core is the most popular processor. The machines made by IBM are
called IBM PCs. Other manufacturers use IBMs specifications and
design their own PCs. They are known as IBM compatible PCs. IBM
PCs mostly use MS-Windows, WINDOWS XP or GNU/Linux as
Operating System. IBM PCs, nowadays (2004) have 64 to 256 MB
main memory, 40 to 80 GB of Hard Disk and a floppy disk or flash
ROM. Besides these a 650 MB CDROM is also provided in PCs
intended for multimedia use. Another company called Apple also
makes pCs. Apple PCs are known as Apple Macintosh. They use
Apples proprietary OS, which is designed for simplicity of use.
Apple Macintosh machines used Motorola 68030 microprocessors
but now use Power PC 603 processor. IBM PCs are today the most
popular computers with millions of them in use throughout the
world.
 Workstations:

Workstations are also desktop machines. They are, however,

more powerful providing processorspeeds about 10 times that
of PCs. Most workstations have a large colour video display unit
(19 inch monitors). Normally they have main memory of around
256 MB to 4 GB and Hard Disk of 80 to 320 GB. Workstations
normally use RISC processors such as MIPS (SIG), RIOS (IBM),
SPARC (SUN), or PA-RISC (HP). Some manufacturers of
Workstations are Silicon Graphics (SIG), IBM, SUN Microsystems
and Hewlett Packard (HP). The standard Operating System of
Workstations is UNIX and its derivatives such as AIX (IBM),
Solaris (SUN), and HP-UX (HP). Very good graphics facilities and
large video screens are provided by most Workstations. A
system called X WINDOWS is provided by Workstations to
display the status of multiple processes during their execution.
Most Workstations have built-in hardware to connect to a Local
 Servers

While manufacturers such as IBM, SUN and Silicon Graphics have

been manufacturing high performance workstations the speed of
Intel Pentium Processors has been going up. In 2004, Pentium
with clock speed 3 GHz are available. They can support several
GB main memories. Thus the difference between high end PCs
and Workstations is vanishing. Today companies such as SUN
make Intel based workstations.While Workstations are
characterized by high performance processors with large screens
for interactive programming, servers are used for specific
purpose such as high performance numerical computing (called
compute server), web page hosting, database store, printing etc.
interactive large screens are not necessary. Compute servers
have performance processors with large main memory, database
servers have big on-line disk storage (100s of GB) and print
servers support several high speed printers.
 Mainframes Computers

There are organizations such as banks and insurance companies

process large number of transactions on-line. They require
computers with very large disks to store several Terabytes of data
and transfer data from disk to main memory at several hundred
Megabytes/sec. The processing power needed from such computers
is hundred million transactions per second. These computers are
much bigger and faster than workstations and several hundred
times more expensive. They normally use proprietary operating
systems, which usually provide high expensive services such as
user accounting, file security and control. They are normally much
more reliable when compared to Operating System on PCs. These
types of computers are called mainframes. These are a few
manufacturers of mainframes (e.g., IBM and Hitachi). The number
of mainframe users has reduced as many organizations are
rewriting their systems to use networks of powerful workstations.
 Supercomputers

Supercomputers are the fastest computers available at any

given time and are normally used to solve problems, which
require intensive numerical computations. Examples of
such problems are numerical weather prediction, designing
supersonic aircrafts, design of drugs and modeling complex
molecules. All of these problems require around
10^16calculations to be performed. These problems will be
solved in about 3 hours by a computer, which can carry out
a trillion floating point calculations per second. Such a
computer is classifieds as supercomputer today (2004). By
about the year 2006 computers which can carry out 10^15
floating point operations per second on 64 bit floating point
numbers would be available and would be the ones which
be called supercomputers. Interconnecting several high
speed computers and programming them to work
 . Recently applications of supercomputers have expanded
beyond scientific computing, they are now used to analyze
large commercial database, produced animated movies and
play games such as chess. Besides arithmetic speed, a
computer to be classified as a supercomputer should have
a large main memory of around 16 GB and a secondary
memory of 1000 GB. The speed of transfer of data from
secondary memory to the main memory should be at least
a tenth of the memory to CPU data transfer speed. All
supercomputers use parallelism to achieve their speed. In
Sec. 12.9 we discuss the organization of parallel computers
Picture gallery
Thank you