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Introduction
Also known as central processing unit A computation engine fabricated on a chip Does the computation of your Desktop, laptop, server etc. Few examples
Pentium, K6, PowerPC, Sparc
They all do approximately the same thing approximately the same way
First microprocessor
Prior to microprocessors
Computers were built either from collection of chips Or discrete components such as transistors Big in size
Life of Microprocessor
Different form life of pi First microprocessor to be used in a computer was 8080 introduced in 1974 8088 (1979) incorporated in the IBM PC (came into market in 1982)
Then the journey was from 8088 to 80286 to 80386 to 80486 to Pentium to Pentium II to Pentium III to Pentium 4 and so on
The Pentium 4 executes any piece of code that 8088 did but only 5000 times faster
Here in the next slide are the differences between various microprocessors launched till the 2004
Compiled from the Intel Microprocessor Quick Reference Guide and TSCP Benchmark Scores
Theres more
Clock Speed: max speed at which the chip can be clocked, will explain this a little more a little later ( from 2 MHz to 3.6 GHz) Data Width: is the width of the ALU (i.e. Arithmetic Logical Unit) 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit or 64 bit usually the external data bus is also of the same width MIPS: Millions of Instructions per second generally used to measure the performance of the CPU
But modern CPUs do so many different things that the rating lose a lot of their meaning
What is a Chip?
Well both of them are.. But dont eat the one on the left
A Chip: Definition
A chip is also called an integrated circuit. Generally it is a small, thin piece of silicon onto which the transistors making up the microprocessor have been etched. A chip might be as large as an inch on a side and can contain tens of millions of transistors. Simpler processors might consist of a few thousand transistors etched onto a chip just a few millimeters square.
Logic!!
A microprocessor has
An address bus (that may be 8, 16 or 32 bits wide) that sends an address to memory A data bus (that may be 8, 16 or 32 bits wide) that can send data to memory or receive data from memory An RD (read) and WR (write) line to tell the memory whether it wants to set or get the addressed location A clock line that lets a clock pulse sequence the processor A reset line that resets the program counter to zero (or whatever) and restarts execution
Microprocessor Memory
ROM: read-only memory chip is programmed with a permanent collection of pre-set bytes.
The address bus tells the ROM chip which byte to get and place on the data bus. When the RD line changes state, the ROM chip presents the selected byte onto the data bus. On a PC also known as BIOS (Basic Input / Output System)
Theres more
RAM: random-access memory contains bytes of information, and the microprocessor can read or write to those bytes depending on whether the RD or WR line is signalled
RAM chips forget everything once the power goes off the reason why we need the need ROM.
Microprocessor Instructions
Everything is in bit pattern i.e. 0 and 1 Nobody is particularly good at remembering these patterns So we give different words to represent different patterns
64-bit Microprocessors
64 bit processors have been with us since 1992 and are now the mainstream Both Intel and AMD have introduced 64-bit chips, and the Mac G5 sports a 64-bit processor 64 bit processors have 64-bit ALUs, 64-bit registers, 64bit buses and so on.
64 bit processor just enlarged address spaces, 32 bit chips are often constrained to a maximum of 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM access which is good.
A 64-bit chip has a 64-bit RAM address space which is 2^64 bytes of RAM is something on the order of a billion gigabytes of RAM.
Examples
Dual-core processor -MD Phenom II X2, Intel Core Duo), Quad-core processor AMD Phenom II X4, Intel's quadcore processors, see i3, i5, and i7 Hexa-core processor AMD Phenom II X6, Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 980X Octa-core processor Intel Xeon E7-2820, AMD FX8150).
Hyper-threading
Hyper-threading is used to improve parallelization of computations performed on PC microprocessors. It first appeared in Feb 2002 on Xeon server processors and in Nov 2002 on Pentium 4. The main function of hyper-threading is to decrease the number of dependent instructions on the pipeline. For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual cores, and shares the workload between them when possible. Thus the OS can schedule two processes at once. In addition two or more processes can use the same resources
Disadvantages
Maximizing the utilization of the computing resources provided by multi-core processors requires adjustments both to the OS support and to existing application software. Integration of a multi-core chip drives chip production yields down and they are more difficult to manage thermally than lower-density single-chip designs.