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 Lecture 06

Processor Structure and Organization

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Reference Book : “Computer Organization and Architecture” by

Stallings

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 CPU Structure

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 Requirements of Processor

Remember Fetch – Decode – Execute Cycle???

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 Requirements of Processor

To do these those required things, the processor needs to:

• store some data temporarily
• remember the location of the next instruction

While an instruction is being executed:

• the processor needs a small internal memory.

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 CPU

Registers

Registers in the processor perform two roles

1. User-visible registers
• Used as internal memory by the assembly language programmer

2. Control and Status registers

• Used to control the operation of the processor
• Used to check the status of the processor / ALU;

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 User-Visible Registers

Referenced by the programmer, categorized into 4 categories

1. General purpose
• Can be assigned to a variety of functions by the programmer
o Memory reference & backup
o Register reference & backup
o Data reference & backup
2. Data
• May be used only to hold data and cannot hold addresses
o Must be able to hold values of most data types
o Some machines allow two contiguous registers to be used, For holding
double-length values

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 User-Visible Registers
3. Address
• Used to hold addresses, examples,
o Stack Pointer
o Program Counter
o Index Registers
• Must be at least long enough to hold the largest address

4. Condition Codes/Flags
• Holding Condition Codes/Flags which are bits set by processor as the
result of operations
• Condition code bits are collected into one or more control register
• As an example, an arithmetic operation can produce,
o positive result
o negative result
o zero result
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 Control and Status Registers

Employed to control the operation of the processor which are mostly not
visible to the user.

Examples,
• Program Counter (PC): Contains instruction address to be fetched
• Instruction Register (IR): Contains last instruction fetched
• Memory Address Register (MAR): Contains memory location address
• Memory Buffer Register (MBR): Contains a word of data to be written to
memory or a word of data read from memory

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Now that we know more about the inner workings of,

• CPU
• Registers
• Bus

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The Interruption Cycle
• Contents of the PC must be saved
• Thus the contents of the PC are
o Transferred to the MBR to be written into memory
o Special memory location is loaded into the MAR
§ E.g.: stack pointer (SP)
• PC is loaded with the address of the interrupt routine.

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What are some of the Techniques to
Increase Processor Performance?

• Increase Frequency (Hz) - Faster number of clock ticks per unit of time.
• Increase Cache-levels - Reduce number of read / writes from high latency memory.
• Multi-core architecture - Parallel Processing
• Reduce Physical size of the processor - Electrical signals travel shorter distances

And One More Technique…

CPU PIPELINING
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