Processors

What is a processor?

• A small chip that resides in computers and other electronic devices. It basic job is to receive input and provide the appropriate output.
• Handles all the basic system instructions such as processing mouse and keyboard input and running applications. It can also handle most complex operations.

What is a processor core?

• A core is the basic individual processing unit of the CPU.
• Modern CPU often include multiple processing cores, which work together to process instructions.
• These cores are contained in one physical unit, they are actually independent processors.

To get the number of cores the CPU contains, press Ctrl + Shift + Esc which opens task manager.

Click on the Performance tab, change the graph view by right clicking inside the graph and hover on Change graph to and click on the Logical processors.

What are the major manufacturing companies of Processors?

• The designs of processors are extremely complex and vary widely between companies and even models.
• Their architectures currently “Ivy Bridge” for Intel and “Piledriver” for AMD are constantly being improved to pack in the most amount of performance in the least amount of space and energy consumption.

What are the four primary functions of the CPU?

Despite all architectural differences the processors go through four main steps.

1. Fetch Each instruction is stored in memory and has its own address. The processor takes this address number from the program counter, which is responsible for tracking which instructions the CPU should execute next.

2. Decode All programs to be executed are translated to into Assembly instructions. Assembly code must be decoded into binary instructions, which are understandable to your CPU. This step is called decoding.

3. Execute While executing instructions the CPU can do one of three things: Do calculations with its ALU, move data from one memory location to another, or jump to a different address.

4. Store The CPU must give feedback after executing an instruction and the output data is written to the memory.

What are the processors other than CPU?

• Besides the CPU, most desktops and laptops include a GPU i.e Graphics Processing Unit.
• This processor is specifically designed providing graphics that are output on a monitor.