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Microprocessor A silicon chip that contains a CPU In the world of personal computers, the terms microprocessor and CPU

are used interchangeably. Microprocessors also control the logic of almost all digital devices.

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Three basic characteristics differentiate microprocessors: instruction set The set of instructions that the
microprocessor can execute.

Band width The number of bits processed in a single instruction. Clock speed Given in megahertz (MHz), the clock speed determines how many instructions per second the processor can execute.

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Commonly used processors Intel processors AMD processors Freescale processors IBM processors

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The introduction of the micrprocessor in the 1970s significantly affected the design and implementation of CPUs. intel released the first microprocessor Intel 4004 in 1970 the widely used microprocessor the Intel 8080 in 1974, this class of CPUs has almost completely overtaken all other central processing unit implementation methods.

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Current Intel processors Itanium 2 used as a server having clock speed 1.3GHz using 410 million transistors Pentium 4 used as a PC having clock speed 1.4 GHz using 42-55 transistors Pentium 3 used as a PC having clock speed 650 MHz using 28-44 transistors

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CPU operation
The fundamental operation of most CPUs, is to execute a sequence of stored instructions called a program. The program is represented by a series of numbers that are kept in some kind of computer memory There are four steps that nearly all CPUs use in their operation fetch, decode, execute, and writeback.

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Fetch involves retrieving an instruction (which is represented by a number or sequence of numbers) from program memory. The location in program memory is determined by a program counter (PC), which stores a number that identifies the current position in the program.

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Decode The instruction that the CPU fetches from memory is used to determine what the CPU is to do. In the decode step, the instruction is broken up into parts that have significance to other portions of the CPU.

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In execute step various portions of the CPU are connected so they can perform the desired operation. for instance, an addition operation was requested, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) will be connected to a set of inputs and a set of outputs. The inputs provide the numbers to be added, and the outputs will contain the final sum. The ALU contains the circuitry to perform simple arithmetic and logical operations on the inputs (like addition and bitwise operations). If the addition operation produces a result too large for the CPU to handle, an arithmetic overflow flag in a flags register may also be set .
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The final step, writeback, simply "writes back" the results of the execute step to some form of memory. Very often the results are written to some internal CPU register for quick access by subsequent instructions. In other cases results may be written to slower, but cheaper and larger, main memory

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Strategies to make computer faster Parallel processing Pipelining Multiprocessing Hyperthreading RISC CISC

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Parallel processing is the simultaneous processing of the same task on two or more microprocessors in order to obtain faster results. The computer resources can include a single computer with multiple processors, or a number of computers connected by a network, or a combination of both. The processors access data through shared memory. Some supercomputers parallel processing systems have hundreds of thousands of microprocessors. Parallel processing is also called parallel computing

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Multiprocessing A processing technique that uses multiple processors in a single computer to solve multiple jobs simultaneously

Engr:sajida Introduction to computiong

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