Questions tagged [cpu]
CPU, stands for Central Processing Unit. It is responsible for carrying out the instructions of a computer program by performing the basic arithmetic, logical, control and input/output (I/O) operations specified by the instructions.
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How to find optimum number of cpu cores for a workload
Following bar graph shows maximum percentage cpu utilization of F16sv2 (16vcpu &32GB) azure virtual machine in last 30 days. Only sometimes CPU usage goes more than 60 percentage.
How to find the ...
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What is the reason or advantage of having special purpose status flags for the result of comparisons? [duplicate]
The C semantics treat the result of a comparison or any true/false operation as just an int ...
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Roles of 80386 MMU Paging Unit and similarity with modern CPU MMU
While searching for the structure of the MMU, I found the image below (80386 Internal Architecture).
I have three questions.
Q1. I'd like to know the roles of 'Adder', 'Page Cache', and 'Control and ...
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How does the program counter "know" when the fetch cycle is complete?
So my understanding of updating the PC is as follows:
Put memory address indicated by PC into memory address register
Load the contents of the address pointed to by memory address register into ...
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Logical address vs physical address
I have been trying to understand the logical and physical address of some data/instruction the logical address is a address generated by the CPU during a execution cycle.So if I write
this code
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Neural networks as building blocks of a computer
I think I have developed a logic circuit which by using combinational logic and flip flops learns to perform the XNOR logic between 2 bits.It is a kind of state machine. Suppose we built a computer ...
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Why is handling word sizes smaller than the native size of a processor sometimes slower?
For example on modern (32-64 bit CPUs), some sources say that manipulating a 32-bit or 64-bit integer will actually be faster than manipulating an 8-bit or 16-bit integer. This the reason for the <...
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Understanding the Relationship Between CPU Registers Amounts and Maximum RAM in 32-bit Architectures
To my knowledge,
The number of CPU registers can tell us the maximum RAM we can have. I am only talking about physical memory, no virtual memory or virtualization in my question.
A 32-bit CPU ...
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Sequence counter in a hardwired control unit
I have been studying the structure of a hardwired control unit and at 8:57 of this video
we get a basic block diagram.What does the sequence counter do exactly?
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Can a branch be pipelined with certainty if the branch condition can be known significantly before the actual branch?
A common issue with CPU performance is that pipelining requires the knowledge of what will come next, and what comes next can only be known once a branch condition is evaluated, so that instructions ...
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RISC-V execution model
I'm reading a text book on CPU architecture and I have something that confuses me: The text book defines 4 different instruction execution models in CPUs, Stack (where a CPU only has a stack and is ...
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Why do these 8 bit registers use 16 I/O wires for input and output to the bus? Why not use 8 wires for both input and output?
I'm looking at this diagram from Ben Eater's "8 bit computer" tutorial
What's the need to use separate 8 wires for only data input, and another 8 wires only for data output?
Why not use only ...
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Logical circuit for priority resolution in interrupt controllers (with configurable priority, not fixed)
I'm interested in what the typical solution is for priority resolution in interrupt controllers. I assume a hardware logic circuit is used, and not software. For interrupt controllers with fixed ...
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Are edge-triggered interrupts "hardware polled"?
Thanks in advance for assistance and patience with my hardware naivety
Reading the below answer about the NMI on pin 6 for an Apple 6502, and the signal on the pin falls from high to low, how does ...
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What does the CPU do in AI model training?
I'm new to computing and even newer still to AI model training. However I am wondering the role of the CPU during training of LLM. I'm aware that the CPUs are good for performing strings of ...
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Is a CPU with a hybrid Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) possible?
Is it possible to (theoretically) develop a CPU having a hybrid ISA such that half of the cores in it use the x86 architecture and the other half uses the ARM architecture? The x86 cores would run the ...
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Are there any radical approaches in CPU development?
I have a desktop PC with the CPU Intel I7-12700F with 180 TDP, the CPU fan Zalman CNPS10X extreme, and Windows 11 and my problem is that The CPU cooling causes much noise when simple tasks are being ...
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How do you determine the amount of bits for the tag, index, and offset in a MIPS byte-addressed direct-mapped cache when given only a list of address?
The question I'm working on is as follows:
I'm still kind of working on how direct-mapped caches work in my computer organization class.
I sort of understand that you need the least significant 2 ...
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Can a CPU instruction be split into 2 inputs?
Let's say there was a CPU with an input bus of 4 bits and the 4 bits are the opcode then the next 4 bits are the operand. It would just be an 8-bit instruction split in two. Is this possible and how ...
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How does a CPU jump to a instruction thats no longer in ram?
Im designing my own CPU but I don't know how it jumps to an instruction that's no longer in ram. People have told me it puts the address in the SSD but for example, if the address were 3 in ram it ...
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I Don't Understand Nothing About Operating Systems even After reading books
I'm a programmer, let's start by that. The question may sound really broad, and in fact it is. I'll list some things that I know, and some other things I've doubts about under the form of questions.
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DMA mode: burst or cycle stealing -- how to know and set? What is blocked?
What component and mechanism determines which DMA transfer mode is used?
How can be identified what DMA mode is used by a device, let's say on Linux?
Let's consider a contemporary AMD or Intel x86-64 ...
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Dependency in pipeline
Assume the pipeline is initially empty and the processor is given 8 instructions to execute. However, the 4th instruction is an instruction whose operands depend on the result of the previous ...
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Is the control bus bidirectional
In one place, I read that the only bidirectional bus is the data bus, but I saw elswhere that the control bus is also. Which is correct?
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What is the completion time of the processes using dynamic priority scheduling?
Consider a preemptive priority based scheduling algorithm based on dynamically changing priority.Larger priority number implies higher priority. When the process is waiting for CPU in the ready queue (...
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How a computer works?
I know that a computer can be mechanical, screws/nuts or even water/pipes. Of course, it would be slow and big, but it doesn't have to be electric, transistors, etc. How can a machine like this do all ...
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A question about cpu utilization
Here's a question in the OS textbook about calculating the cpu utilization.
I've tried to write down the (A) by myself as below.
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Can compilers improve performance in real workloads by inserting prefetches in their output?
Prefetching is a task that the compiler feels like it should be suited for. Prefetching requires knowing in advance what data the program is about to load, and the compiler has a ton of information at ...
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How efficient is register renaming?
As I understand, all modern CPUs perform register renaming: given a sequence of instructions to interpret, they check which registers these instructions use, detect patterns where a register's ...
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CPU limit for bitap algorithm bitmask
We have bitap (shift OR) algorithm that searches for a substring in a text.
Bitap algorithm uses bit masks, so that it can perform bitwise operations very fast with the help of CPU.
For example:
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Is this how endianess work relative to memory?
So I've been trying to understand endianess for the past couple of days but I'm not sure if I'm overthinking this or not and I don't have anyone I can ask to confirm things.
Here is how I look at ...
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How are setup and hold and timing constraints handled when reading an address from memory?
When an operand encodes an address, and that address changes the "memory address register" and the word in memory being addressed, it seems like timing issues could be a problem. Examples, ...
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Is the reason for a stack to decrease the size of a program (by adding the use of subroutines)?
The stack allows subroutines to be used. It can store return address for "return from subroutine" instruction (RTN) and also arguments for the function.
It is not possible to store return ...
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Are variables stored again in RAM?
Assuming this set of instructions:
declare variable 'A' which has value 5
declare variable 'B' which has value 2
From what I've understood, those instructions are loaded into RAM an then read by CPU,...
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What is the most critical component of a processor? [closed]
We know that there are basically 3 fundamental parts of a processor namely :
Control Unit (CU)
Arithmetical Logic Unit (ALU)
Clock
Also we know that they maintain several important and different ...
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I need to test the speed of performing arithmetic operations on binary numbers
As part of a college project, I need to compare the speed of arithmetic operations directly in binary on different processors.
Example:
At what speed will binary addition be performed on an Intel Core ...
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If a process needs more RAM, does the Page size simply get bigger or does it get a new page?
Let's say I have a Operating System with 4KB page size, but I need to allocate 8kb of memory for all the variables. Does the Process get new page (second one) or does the current page table simply get ...
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What happens in harvard architecture pipelining if cpu needs to write data and fetch data at the same time?
What happens if Operand Fetch and Write Back happen in same cycle?
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How are processor instructions stored in RAM?
I've recently been designing a simple 8-bit microprocessor, similar to the Intel 8008. It doesn't make use of anything advanced as pipelining, as my knowledge isn't at that level yet to know how to ...
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How does instruction set architecture affects clock rate?
According to the computer organization and design RISC-V 2nd edition 2020, section 1.5, the following table states that ISA affects clock rate.
Hardware or software component
Affects what?
How?
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What is a CPU clock physically?
I can't seem to get a straight answer as to what a CPU clock is.
I know there are quartz crystal clocks that work by the bending of quartz that happens as an electrical current is passed through it. ...
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Are really only ~1% of the physical CPU space used for computing
In a Talk by Herb Sutter C++ and Beyond 2012: Herb Sutter - atomic Weapons 1 of 2 at 46:30 the point is made that only around 15% of the physical space (or the transistors) on a CPU do actual ...
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"Hack computer" from Nand2Tetris registers, any real world examples of similar design?
The "Hack CPU" (Wikipedia/Hack_computer) is a theoretical computer design created by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken and described in their book and also used in their Coursera course ...
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Why scopes in general do not have prologue and epilogue instructions?
Data only accessible in a scope, seems to still be maintained by the stack. What is the reason that entering and exiting scopes (in general) does not do the same "prologue and epilogue" ...
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Program counter in ISA with multi-word size for instructions
Some ISA's have instructions that are multiple words, such as the MOV instruction in x86. How does the program counter behave in that case, if the instruction loaded is more than one word? For example,...
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The opcode "load the next word into Register A" mentioned by Gandalf61
Gandalf61 mentions here that there are opcodes that "load the next word into Register A", treat the bits at the next address defined by program counter as data and loads this data. I am ...
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Do ALUs tend to do operations in parallel even if they are not selected by the machine instruction?
I was playing nandgame.com and noticed that the arithmetic unit of the ALU was doing both the add and subtract operation in parallel, but only asks for one operation per instruction. This to me seemed ...
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Why XMM register width is 128-bit while double precision floating point is 64-bit?
As far as I know, XMM is used to store floating point. But Highest width floating point according IEEE754 standard is double precision (64-bit). But why XMM register width is 128-bit. Is another 64-...
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Why there is no user interaction between uni-programming and multi-programming systems?
I was going through my Operating Systems book and in the disadvantages, they wrote that there is no user interaction between the user and computer in uni-programming and multi-programming systems and ...
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How does CPU determine Reserved Exponent cases?
Using IEEE 754 algorithm i assume, that it can be implemented in a branchless way.
But how does CPU determine special cases (Reserved Exponent values):
Exponent
Significand
is
11111111
000000000...
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