What is CPU short for?
Central Processing Unit
What is inside a processor?
Transistors
Use of a transistor?
(4 things)
Where are transistors located in CPU?
Very thin slice of silicon (single silicon chip)
How many transistors are there in a silicon chip?
How much silicon chips are there in a CPU?
Thousands
A large number
How much do silicon chips cover on the CPU?
Benefit of this?
Couple of square centimetres
Able to hold several million transistors, processing hundreds of millions of instructions per second
What is CPU architecture?
The design of a Microprocessor, an integrated circuit, where components of CPU are combined as a single unit
Who was Von Neumann?
What he do?
• A guy who proposed idea of storing program instructions
• in same memory as the data
What did the idea of stored program lead to?
stored program = Von Neumann architecture
What are CPUs really used for?
Processing data and instructions
What are the 4 components of the CPU?
What does the controller do?
(CPU)
What does arithmetic and logic unit (ALU) do?
(CPU)
What do registers do?
(CPU)
What is the internal memory?
(CPU)
What do buses do?
(CPU)
What are the 3 main buses
(CPU)
Address bus
Data bus
Control bus
What does address bus do?
(CPU)
What is the data bus?
(CPU)
Use of control bus?
(CPU)
Describe fetch-decode-execute cycle
(3 steps to processing instructions given by currently running program)
(CPU)
What do ppl demand from CPUs?
Faster processing speed
What is cache memory?
(CPU)
Problem with cache memory in CPU?
Expensive, most pc systems have very little cache memory, relying on RAM