The CPU

Central Processing Unit

Switches, Bits and Bytes
• A Computer chip is essentially a huge collection
of switches that can be turned on and off
• A switch that is on is given the number 1
• A switch that is off is given the number 0
• This is binary
• In computer terminology one of these numbers
is called a bit.
• 1 Bit – a 1 or a 0
• 8 Bits = 1 Byte
• 1024 Bytes = 1Kilobyte (Kb)
• 1024 Kb = 1 Megabyte (Mb)
• 1024 Mb = 1 Gigabyte (Gb)
• 1024 Gb = 1 Terabyte (Tb)
• 1024 Tb = 1 Pentabyte (Pb)
Central Processing Unit
• the CPU is the device that performs the
calculations that make computing possible
• Although there are several CPU manufacturers,
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) make
the vast majority of processors used in Windows-
based PCs
• One other processor family worth mentioning is
the very inexpensive VIA C3 family from VIA
Technologies (via.com.tw), which has started to
show up in some similarly inexpensive systems.
Clock Speed
• Clock Cycle
▫ The Computer and microprocessor has a clock that
controls the timing of functions of the computer. Old
Computers took multiple clock cycles to perform a
single calculation. Modern processors can perform
multiple calculations in a single cycle
• There are a number of clocks in a PC
▫ CPU Clock – Controls the speed of the CPU
▫ System Clock – Controls the speed of the system bus.
Different to the CPU clock. Memory runs at this speed
CPU Terminology
• BUS
▫ The Bus is a data pathway in the computer.
▫ The wires on the motherboard that allows the CPU
to communicate with the other devices in the
computer
▫ The system bus is central to how the CPU and the
Computer works
Buses
• There are lots of buses such as the internal bus,
the external bus, expansion bus, data bus,
memory bus, PCI bus, ISA bus, address bus,
control bus,
• We will be looking at some of these in this course
and how they work.
System bus
• Made up of 3 different buses/Controls
▫ Data Bus
▫ Address Bus
▫ Control Bus
• To understand how the bus works you must look
at how data is transmitted.
Data transmission
• Data is broken up into 3 parts to be transmitted
along a bus
Co Co Ad
ntr Data ntr dre
ol ol ss

• The Data being transmitted

• The Address that tells the data where to go
• The Control that ensures the data arrives
complete
• The Address bus controls where the data goes.
▫ Each component has a unique address. The
address bus ensures that the data goes to the
correct device
• Control Bus ensures that the data arrives
correctly to the device
▫ It contains a check that makes sure that the data is
complete when it arrives
• Data bus Carries the data
▫ The data being sent by the CPU
BUS Size
• Is your computer a 16Bit, 32Bit or 64Bit
computer
• This is the size of the bus.
• A 32Bit bus can send 32 Bits of data at the same
time.
• It allows it to access a maximum amount of
memory at one time.
▫ 32 Bit can access 4Gb at 1 time
▫ 64 Bit can access 16Eb (Exabytes = 1024
Pentabytes)
Example
• http://computer.howstuffworks.com/computer-
memory3.htm
• Front Side Bus (FSB):
▫ Measured in megahertz (MHz), the FSB is the
channel that connects the processor with main
memory. The faster this is, the better the
performance will be.
• Sockets and slots:
▫ processors either fit in a socket or slot, depending on
their construction. There are quite a few different
socket and slot types.
• Pins:
▫ Within the categories of sockets and slots, there are
different types of each. The types vary by size, and
number and configuration of pins.
Cache (pronounced “cash”):
• All new CPUs have cache memory. Cache, as it
pertains to CPUs, is expensive high-speed memory
used for storing frequently used instructions. The
less expensive CPU lines, Intel, Celeron, and AMD
Duron, have less cache than their otherwise
equivalent Pentium and Athlon cousins.
• Different types of cache memory
▫ L1 – This is cache memory that sits on the CPU and
runs at the CPU Clock speed
▫ L2 – This sits between CPU and Main Memory and
runs at system clock speed
Intel Processor History
 The date is the year that the processor was first introduced. Many
processors are re-introduced at higher clock speeds for many years
after the original release date.
 Transistors is the number of transistors on the chip.
 Microns is the width, in microns, of the smallest wire on the chip.
For comparison, a human hair is 100 microns thick. As the feature
size on the chip goes down, the number of transistors rises.
 Clock speed is the maximum rate that the chip can be clocked at.
Clock speed will make more sense in the next section.
 Data Width is the width of the ALU. An 8-bit ALU can
add/subtract/multiply/etc
 MIPS stands for "millions of instructions per second" and is a
rough measure of the performance of a CPU. Modern CPUs can do
so many different things that MIPS ratings lose a lot of their
meaning, but you can get a general sense of the relative power of
the CPUs from this column.
How does the CPU Work?
 A microprocessor executes a collection of machine
instructions that tell the processor what to do. Based on
the instructions, a microprocessor does three basic
things:
 Using its ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit), a microprocessor can
perform mathematical operations like addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division. Modern microprocessors contain
complete floating point processors that can perform
extremely sophisticated operations on large floating point
numbers.
 A microprocessor can move data from one memory location
to another.
 A microprocessor can make decisions and jump to a new set
of instructions based on those decisions.
 This is about as simple as a microprocessor gets. This
microprocessor has:
 An address bus (that may be 8, 16 or 32 bits wide) that
sends an address to memory
 A data bus (that may be 8, 16 or 32 bits wide) that can
send data to memory or receive data from memory
 An RD (read) and WR (write) line to tell the memory
whether it wants to set or get the addressed location
 A clock line that lets a clock pulse sequence the
processor
 A reset line that resets the program counter to zero (or
whatever) and restarts execution
 We’ve talked about the address and data buses,
as well as the RD and WR lines. These buses
and lines connect either to RAM or ROM
 ROM stands for read-only memory. A ROM
chip is programmed with a permanent
collection of pre-set bytes. The address bus tells
the ROM chip which byte to get and place on
the data bus
Using the CPU
 Even a simple processor can have a large library of
instructions that it uses for it’s operation
 The collection of instructions is implemented as bit
patterns, each one of which has a different
meaning when loaded into the instruction register.
 We are not good at remembering bit patterns so a
set of instructions were created to represent what
each bit pattern did in the processor.
 This collection of words is called the assembly
language of the processor
 An Assembler converts this code into the bit
patterns that the processor will recognise
Microprocessor Performance
 The number of transistors that a processor has a direct
effect on the performance of the Processor
 a typical instruction in an old processor like an 8088
took 15 clock cycles to execute.
 With more transistors, much more powerful multipliers
capable of single-cycle speeds become possible.
 More transistors also allow for a technology called
pipelining.
 In a pipelined architecture, instruction execution
overlaps. So even though it might take five clock cycles
to execute each instruction, there can be five
instructions in various stages of execution
simultaneously.
Pipelineing
• Each instruction takes 5 cycles to execute
• Normally CPU has to wait for one to finish
before starting the next
1 2
• Pipelining allows staggered execution
1 5
2
3
4
• Many modern processors have multiple
instruction decoders, each with its own pipeline.
• This allows for multiple instruction streams,
which means that more than one instruction can
complete during each clock cycle.
The Future
 For the last number of years the trend has been towards full
32bit ALU’s and fast Floating Point Units and pipelined
execution with multiple instruction streams.
 For a time the next step was logically jump to a 64bit
processor. Particularly used in servers.
 Also used has been the inclusion of special code on the
processor to preform specific tasks (MMX)
 A new development in recent times is towards multiple core
processors.
 All of these cause the transistor count to rise and modern
processors can have multiple million transistors on them.
 Modern processors can execute up to 1 Billion
(1,000,000,000) instructions per second.
 The 64bit processor was developed in 1992.
 Both Intel and AMD have introduced 64-bit chips
 Why Use 64Bit?
 Thirty-two-bit chips are often constrained to a
maximum of 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM access.
 A 64-bit chip has none of these constraints because
a 64-bit RAM address space is essentially infinite
for the foreseeable future -- 2^64 bytes of RAM is
something on the order of a billion gigabytes of
RAM.
 A 64 System also has faster data buses which
means faster Input and output.