When asked about how a central processing unit works, you might say it’s the brain of the computer. It does all the calculations on math and makes logical decisions based on certain … See more

The memory management unit’s primary job is to translate addresses from virtual address space to physical address space. Virtual address space allows the system to make programs believe th… See more

The bare minimum a general processor will have is the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU). This execution unit … See more

Bits on a processor usually refers to the largest data size it can handle at once. It mostly applies to the execution unit. However, this does not mean that a processor is only limited to processing data of that size. An eight-… See more

Instruction sets map numerical indexes to commands in a processor. These commands can be something as simple as adding two numbers or as complex as the SSE instruction RSQRTPS (as described in a help file: Compute Rec… See more

As their names suggests, these units grab instructions and decode them into operations. Notable in modern x86 designs, the decoder turns … See more

Registers are small bits of memory that hold immediately relevant data. There’s usually only a handful of them and they can hold data equal to the bit-size the processor was made for. So a 32-bit processor usually has 32-b… See more

Over the years of computer design, more and more ideas and designs were realized. These were developed with the goal of making the processor more efficient at what it does, inc… See more

Early on, computers could do only one thing at a time and once it got going, it would go until completion, or until there was a problem with the pro… See more