Central processing unit

A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor or main processor, is the
electronic circuitry within a computer that executes instructions that make up a computer program.
The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and input/output (I/O) operations specified
by the instructions. The computer industry has used the term "central processing unit" at least since
the early 1960s.[1] Traditionally, the term "CPU" refers to a processor, more specifically to its
processing unit and control unit (CU), distinguishing these core elements of a computer from
An Intel 80486DX2
external components such as main memory and I/O circuitry.[2] CPU, as seen from
above
The form, design, and implementation of CPUs have changed over the course of their history, but
their fundamental operation remains almost unchanged. Principal components of a CPU include the
arithmetic logic unit (ALU) that performs arithmetic and logic operations, processor registers that
supply operands to the ALU and store the results of ALU operations, and a control unit that
orchestrates the fetching (from memory) and execution of instructions by directing the coordinated
operations of the ALU, registers and other components.
Bottom side of an
Intel 80486DX2,
Most modern CPUs are microprocessors, where the CPU is contained on a single metal-oxide-
showing its pins
semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) chip. An IC that contains a CPU may also contain
memory, peripheral interfaces, and other components of a computer; such integrated devices are
variously called microcontrollers or systems on a chip (SoC). Some computers employ a multi-core processor, which is a single
chip containing two or more CPUs called "cores"; in that context, one can speak of such single chips as "sockets".[3]

Array processors or vector processors have multiple processors that operate in parallel, with no unit considered central. There
also exists the concept of virtual CPUs which are an abstraction of dynamical aggregated computational resources.[4]

Contents
History
Transistor CPUs
Small-scale integration CPUs
Large-scale integration CPUs
Microprocessors
Operation
Fetch
Decode
Execute
Structure and implementation
Control unit
Arithmetic logic unit
Address generation unit
Memory management unit (MMU)
Cache
Clock rate
Integer range
Parallelism
 Instruction-level parallelism
Task-level parallelism
Data parallelism

Virtual CPUs
Performance
See also
Notes
References
External links

History
Early computers such as the ENIAC had to be physically rewired to perform
different tasks, which caused these machines to be called "fixed-program
computers".[5] Since the term "CPU" is generally defined as a device for
software (computer program) execution, the earliest devices that could rightly be
called CPUs came with the advent of the stored-program computer.

The idea of a stored-program computer had been already present in the design of
J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly's ENIAC, but was initially omitted
so that it could be finished sooner.[6] On June 30, 1945, before ENIAC was
made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First
Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. It was the outline of a stored-program
computer that would eventually be completed in August 1949.[7] EDVAC was
designed to perform a certain number of instructions (or operations) of various
types. Significantly, the programs written for EDVAC were to be stored in high-
speed computer memory rather than specified by the physical wiring of the
EDVAC, one of the first stored-
computer.[8] This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, which was the
program computers
considerable time and effort required to reconfigure the computer to perform a
new task.[9] With von Neumann's design, the program that EDVAC ran could be
changed simply by changing the contents of the memory. EDVAC, however, was not the first stored-program computer; the
Manchester Baby, a small-scale experimental stored-program computer, ran its first program on 21 June 1948[10] and the
Manchester Mark 1 ran its first program during the night of 16–17 June 1949.[11]

Early CPUs were custom designs used as part of a larger and sometimes distinctive computer.[12] However, this method of
designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of multi-purpose processors
produced in large quantities. This standardization began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has
rapidly accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit (IC). The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be
designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers.[13] Both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs
have increased the presence of digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines.
Modern microprocessors appear in electronic devices ranging from automobiles[14] to cellphones,[15] and sometimes even in
toys.[16][17]

While von Neumann is most often credited with the design of the stored-program computer because of his design of EDVAC, and
the design became known as the von Neumann architecture, others before him, such as Konrad Zuse, had suggested and
implemented similar ideas.[18] The so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, which was completed before
EDVAC,[19][20] also used a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory.[21] The key
difference between the von Neumann and Harvard architectures is that the latter separates the storage and treatment of CPU
instructions and data, while the former uses the same memory space for both.[22] Most modern CPUs are primarily von Neumann
in design, but CPUs with the Harvard architecture are seen as well, especially in embedded applications; for instance, the Atmel
AVR microcontrollers are Harvard architecture processors.[23]

Relays and vacuum tubes (thermionic tubes) were commonly used as switching elements;[24][25] a useful computer requires
thousands or tens of thousands of switching devices. The overall speed of a system is dependent on the speed of the switches.
Tube computers like EDVAC tended to average eight hours between failures, whereas relay computers like the (slower, but
earlier) Harvard Mark I failed very rarely.[1] In the end, tube-based CPUs became dominant because the significant speed
advantages afforded generally outweighed the reliability problems. Most of these early synchronous CPUs ran at low clock rates
compared to modern microelectronic designs. Clock signal frequencies ranging from 100 kHz to 4 MHz were very common at
this time, limited largely by the speed of the switching devices they were built with.[26]

Transistor CPUs
The design complexity of CPUs increased as various technologies facilitated
building smaller and more reliable electronic devices. The first such
improvement came with the advent of the transistor. Transistorized CPUs during
the 1950s and 1960s no longer had to be built out of bulky, unreliable and fragile
switching elements like vacuum tubes and relays.[27] With this improvement
more complex and reliable CPUs were built onto one or several printed circuit
boards containing discrete (individual) components.

In 1964, IBM introduced its IBM System/360 computer architecture that was
used in a series of computers capable of running the same programs with
different speed and performance.[28] This was significant at a time when most
electronic computers were incompatible with one another, even those made by IBM PowerPC 604e processor
the same manufacturer. To facilitate this improvement, IBM used the concept of
a microprogram (often called "microcode"), which still sees widespread usage in
modern CPUs.[29] The System/360 architecture was so popular that it dominated the mainframe computer market for decades and
left a legacy that is still continued by similar modern computers like the IBM zSeries.[30][31] In 1965, Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) introduced another influential computer aimed at the scientific and research markets, the PDP-8.[32]

Transistor-based computers had several distinct advantages over their predecessors. Aside from facilitating increased reliability
and lower power consumption, transistors also allowed CPUs to operate at much higher speeds because of the short switching
time of a transistor in comparison to a tube or relay.[33] The increased reliability and dramatically increased speed of the
switching elements (which were almost exclusively transistors by this time), CPU clock rates in the tens of megahertz were easily
obtained during this period.[34] Additionally while discrete transistor and IC CPUs were in heavy usage, new high-performance
designs like SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) vector processors began to appear.[35] These early experimental designs
later gave rise to the era of specialized supercomputers like those made by Cray Inc and Fujitsu Ltd.[35]

Small-scale integration CPUs

During this period, a method of manufacturing many interconnected transistors in a compact space was developed. The integrated
circuit (IC) allowed a large number of transistors to be manufactured on a single semiconductor-based die, or "chip". At first,
only very basic non-specialized digital circuits such as NOR gates were miniaturized into ICs.[36] CPUs based on these "building
block" ICs are generally referred to as "small-scale integration" (SSI) devices. SSI ICs, such as the ones used in the Apollo
Guidance Computer, usually contained up to a few dozen transistors. To build an entire CPU out of SSI ICs required thousands of
individual chips, but still consumed much less space and power than earlier discrete transistor designs.[37]
IBM's System/370, follow-on to the System/360, used SSI ICs rather than Solid
Logic Technology discrete-transistor modules.[38][39] DEC's PDP-8/I and KI10
PDP-10 also switched from the individual transistors used by the PDP-8 and
PDP-10 to SSI ICs,[40] and their extremely popular PDP-11 line was originally
built with SSI ICs but was eventually implemented with LSI components once
these became practical.

Large-scale integration CPUs

The MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as
the MOS transistor, was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell
Labs in 1959, and demonstrated in 1960.[41] This led to the development of the
MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) integrated circuit, proposed by Atalla in
1960[42] and Kahng in 1961, and then fabricated by Fred Heiman and Steven
Hofstein at RCA in 1962.[41] With its high scalability,[43] and much lower
power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors,[44] the Fujitsu board with SPARC64 VIIIfx
processors
MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits.[45][46]

Lee Boysel published influential articles, including a 1967 "manifesto", which

described how to build the equivalent of a 32-bit mainframe computer from a
relatively small number of large-scale integration circuits (LSI).[47][48] The only
way to build LSI chips, which are chips with a hundred or more gates, was to
build them using a MOS semiconductor manufacturing process (either PMOS
logic, NMOS logic, or CMOS logic). However, some companies continued to
build processors out of bipolar transistor–transistor logic (TTL) chips because
bipolar junction transistors were faster than MOS chips up until the 1970s (a few
companies such as Datapoint continued to build processors out of TTL chips
until the early 1980s).[48] In the 1960s, MOS ICs were slower and initially CPU, core memory and external bus
interface of a DEC PDP-8/I, made of
considered useful only in applications that required low power.[49][50] Following
medium-scale integrated circuits
the development of silicon-gate MOS technology by Federico Faggin at
Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, MOS ICs largely replaced bipolar TTL as the
standard chip technology in the early 1970s.[51]

As the microelectronic technology advanced, an increasing number of transistors were placed on ICs, decreasing the number of
individual ICs needed for a complete CPU. MSI and LSI ICs increased transistor counts to hundreds, and then thousands. By
1968, the number of ICs required to build a complete CPU had been reduced to 24 ICs of eight different types, with each IC
containing roughly 1000 MOSFETs.[52] In stark contrast with its SSI and MSI predecessors, the first LSI implementation of the
PDP-11 contained a CPU composed of only four LSI integrated circuits.[53]

Microprocessors
Advances in MOS IC technology led to the invention of the microprocessor in the early 1970s.[54] Since the introduction of the
first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971, and the first widely used microprocessor, the Intel 8080 in
1974, this class of CPUs has almost completely overtaken all other central processing unit implementation methods. Mainframe
and minicomputer manufacturers of the time launched proprietary IC development programs to upgrade their older computer
architectures, and eventually produced instruction set compatible microprocessors that were backward-compatible with their
older hardware and software. Combined with the advent and eventual success of
the ubiquitous personal computer, the term CPU is now applied almost
exclusively[a] to microprocessors. Several CPUs (denoted cores) can be
combined in a single processing chip.[55]

Previous generations of CPUs were implemented as discrete components and

numerous small integrated circuits (ICs) on one or more circuit boards.[56]
Microprocessors, on the other hand, are CPUs manufactured on a very small
number of ICs; usually just one.[57] The overall smaller CPU size, as a result of
being implemented on a single die, means faster switching time because of Die of an Intel 80486DX2
physical factors like decreased gate parasitic capacitance.[58][59] This has microprocessor (actual size: 12 ×
6.75 mm) in its packaging
allowed synchronous microprocessors to have clock rates ranging from tens of
megahertz to several gigahertz. Additionally, the ability to construct exceedingly
small transistors on an IC has increased the complexity and number of
transistors in a single CPU many fold. This widely observed trend is described
by Moore's law, which had proven to be a fairly accurate predictor of the growth
of CPU (and other IC) complexity until 2016.[60][61]

While the complexity, size, construction and general form of CPUs have
changed enormously since 1950,[62] the basic design and function has not
changed much at all. Almost all common CPUs today can be very accurately
described as von Neumann stored-program machines.[63][b] As Moore's law no
longer holds, concerns have arisen about the limits of integrated circuit
transistor technology. Extreme miniaturization of electronic gates is causing the
effects of phenomena like electromigration and subthreshold leakage to become
much more significant.[65][66] These newer concerns are among the many
factors causing researchers to investigate new methods of computing such as the
quantum computer, as well as to expand the usage of parallelism and other
methods that extend the usefulness of the classical von Neumann model. Intel Core i5 CPU on a Vaio E series
laptop motherboard (on the right,
beneath the heat pipe)
Operation
The fundamental operation of most CPUs, regardless of the physical form they
take, is to execute a sequence of stored instructions that is called a program. The instructions to be executed are kept in some kind
of computer memory. Nearly all CPUs follow the fetch, decode and execute steps in their operation, which are collectively
known as the instruction cycle.

After the execution of an instruction, the entire process repeats, with the next instruction cycle normally fetching the next-in-
sequence instruction because of the incremented value in the program counter. If a jump instruction was executed, the program
counter will be modified to contain the address of the instruction that was jumped to and program execution continues normally.
In more complex CPUs, multiple instructions can be fetched, decoded and executed simultaneously. This section describes what
is generally referred to as the "classic RISC pipeline", which is quite common among the simple CPUs used in many electronic
devices (often called microcontroller). It largely ignores the important role of CPU cache, and therefore the access stage of the
pipeline.

Some instructions manipulate the program counter rather than producing result data directly; such instructions are generally
called "jumps" and facilitate program behavior like loops, conditional program execution (through the use of a conditional jump),
and existence of functions.[c] In some processors, some other instructions change the state of bits in a "flags" register. These flags
can be used to influence how a program behaves, since they often indicate the outcome of various operations. For example, in
such processors a "compare" instruction evaluates two values and sets or clears bits in the flags register to indicate which one is
greater or whether they are equal; one of these flags could then be used by a later jump instruction to determine program flow.

Fetch
The first step, fetch, involves retrieving an instruction (which is represented by a number or sequence of numbers) from program
memory. The instruction's location (address) in program memory is determined by a program counter (PC), which stores a
number that identifies the address of the next instruction to be fetched. After an instruction is fetched, the PC is incremented by
the length of the instruction so that it will contain the address of the next instruction in the sequence.[d] Often, the instruction to
be fetched must be retrieved from relatively slow memory, causing the CPU to stall while waiting for the instruction to be
returned. This issue is largely addressed in modern processors by caches and pipeline architectures (see below).

Decode
The instruction that the CPU fetches from memory determines what the CPU will do. In the decode step, performed by the
circuitry known as the instruction decoder, the instruction is converted into signals that control other parts of the CPU.

The way in which the instruction is interpreted is defined by the CPU's instruction set architecture (ISA).[e] Often, one group of
bits (that is, a "field") within the instruction, called the opcode, indicates which operation is to be performed, while the remaining
fields usually provide supplemental information required for the operation, such as the operands. Those operands may be
specified as a constant value (called an immediate value), or as the location of a value that may be a processor register or a
memory address, as determined by some addressing mode.

In some CPU designs the instruction decoder is implemented as a hardwired, unchangeable circuit. In others, a microprogram is
used to translate instructions into sets of CPU configuration signals that are applied sequentially over multiple clock pulses. In
some cases the memory that stores the microprogram is rewritable, making it possible to change the way in which the CPU
decodes instructions.

Execute
After the fetch and decode steps, the execute step is performed. Depending on the CPU architecture, this may consist of a single
action or a sequence of actions. During each action, various parts of the CPU are electrically connected so they can perform all or
part of the desired operation and then the action is completed, typically in response to a clock pulse. Very often the results are
written to an internal CPU register for quick access by subsequent instructions. In other cases results may be written to slower,
but less expensive and higher capacity main memory.

For example, if an addition instruction is to be executed, the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) inputs are connected to a pair of operand
sources (numbers to be summed), the ALU is configured to perform an addition operation so that the sum of its operand inputs
will appear at its output, and the ALU output is connected to storage (e.g., a register or memory) that will receive the sum. When
the clock pulse occurs, the sum will be transferred to storage and, if the resulting sum is too large (i.e., it is larger than the ALU's
output word size), an arithmetic overflow flag will be set.

Structure and implementation

Hardwired into a CPU's circuitry is a set of basic operations it can perform, called an instruction set. Such operations may
involve, for example, adding or subtracting two numbers, comparing two numbers, or jumping to a different part of a program.
Each basic operation is represented by a particular combination of bits, known as the machine language opcode; while executing
instructions in a machine language program, the CPU decides which operation to perform by "decoding" the opcode. A complete
machine language instruction consists of an opcode
and, in many cases, additional bits that specify
arguments for the operation (for example, the
numbers to be summed in the case of an addition
operation). Going up the complexity scale, a
machine language program is a collection of
machine language instructions that the CPU
executes.

The actual mathematical operation for each

instruction is performed by a combinational logic
circuit within the CPU's processor known as the
arithmetic logic unit or ALU. In general, a CPU
executes an instruction by fetching it from memory,
using its ALU to perform an operation, and then
Block diagram of a basic uniprocessor-CPU computer. Black
storing the result to memory. Beside the instructions
lines indicate data flow, whereas red lines indicate control flow;
for integer mathematics and logic operations,
arrows indicate flow directions.
various other machine instructions exist, such as
those for loading data from memory and storing it
back, branching operations, and mathematical operations on floating-point numbers performed by the CPU's floating-point unit
(FPU).[67]

Control unit
The control unit (CU) is a component of the CPU that directs the operation of the processor. It tells the computer's memory,
arithmetic and logic unit and input and output devices how to respond to the instructions that have been sent to the processor.

It directs the operation of the other units by providing timing and control signals. Most computer resources are managed by the
CU. It directs the flow of data between the CPU and the other devices. John von Neumann included the control unit as part of the
von Neumann architecture. In modern computer designs, the control unit is typically an internal part of the CPU with its overall
role and operation unchanged since its introduction.

Arithmetic logic unit

The arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a digital circuit within the
processor that performs integer arithmetic and bitwise logic
operations. The inputs to the ALU are the data words to be
operated on (called operands), status information from previous
operations, and a code from the control unit indicating which
operation to perform. Depending on the instruction being executed,
the operands may come from internal CPU registers or external
memory, or they may be constants generated by the ALU itself.
Symbolic representation of an ALU and its input
When all input signals have settled and propagated through the and output signals
ALU circuitry, the result of the performed operation appears at the
ALU's outputs. The result consists of both a data word, which may
be stored in a register or memory, and status information that is typically stored in a special, internal CPU register reserved for
this purpose.
Address generation unit
Address generation unit (AGU), sometimes also called address computation unit (ACU),[68] is an execution unit inside the
CPU that calculates addresses used by the CPU to access main memory. By having address calculations handled by separate
circuitry that operates in parallel with the rest of the CPU, the number of CPU cycles required for executing various machine
instructions can be reduced, bringing performance improvements.

While performing various operations, CPUs need to calculate memory addresses required for fetching data from the memory; for
example, in-memory positions of array elements must be calculated before the CPU can fetch the data from actual memory
locations. Those address-generation calculations involve different integer arithmetic operations, such as addition, subtraction,
modulo operations, or bit shifts. Often, calculating a memory address involves more than one general-purpose machine
instruction, which do not necessarily decode and execute quickly. By incorporating an AGU into a CPU design, together with
introducing specialized instructions that use the AGU, various address-generation calculations can be offloaded from the rest of
the CPU, and can often be executed quickly in a single CPU cycle.

Capabilities of an AGU depend on a particular CPU and its architecture. Thus, some AGUs implement and expose more address-
calculation operations, while some also include more advanced specialized instructions that can operate on multiple operands at a
time. Furthermore, some CPU architectures include multiple AGUs so more than one address-calculation operation can be
executed simultaneously, bringing further performance improvements by capitalizing on the superscalar nature of advanced CPU
designs. For example, Intel incorporates multiple AGUs into its Sandy Bridge and Haswell microarchitectures, which increase
bandwidth of the CPU memory subsystem by allowing multiple memory-access instructions to be executed in parallel.

Memory management unit (MMU)

Most high-end microprocessors (in desktop, laptop, server computers) have a memory management unit, translating logical
addresses into physical RAM addresses, providing memory protection and paging abilities, useful for virtual memory. Simpler
processors, especially microcontrollers, usually don't include an MMU.

Cache
A CPU cache[69] is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or
energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, closer to a processor core, which stores copies
of the data from frequently used main memory locations. Most CPUs have different independent caches, including instruction and
data caches, where the data cache is usually organized as a hierarchy of more cache levels (L1, L2, L3, L4, etc.).

All modern (fast) CPUs (with few specialized exceptions[70]) have multiple levels of CPU caches. The first CPUs that used a
cache had only one level of cache; unlike later level 1 caches, it was not split into L1d (for data) and L1i (for instructions).
Almost all current CPUs with caches have a split L1 cache. They also have L2 caches and, for larger processors, L3 caches as
well. The L2 cache is usually not split and acts as a common repository for the already split L1 cache. Every core of a multi-core
processor has a dedicated L2 cache and is usually not shared between the cores. The L3 cache, and higher-level caches, are shared
between the cores and are not split. An L4 cache is currently uncommon, and is generally on dynamic random-access memory
(DRAM), rather than on static random-access memory (SRAM), on a separate die or chip. That was also the case historically with
L1, while bigger chips have allowed integration of it and generally all cache levels, with the possible exception of the last level.
Each extra level of cache tends to be bigger and be optimized differently.

Other types of caches exist (that are not counted towards the "cache size" of the most important caches mentioned above), such as
the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) that is part of the memory management unit (MMU) that most CPUs have.

Caches are generally sized in powers of two: 4, 8, 16 etc. KiB or MiB (for larger non-L1) sizes, although the IBM z13 has a 96
KiB L1 instruction cache.[71]
Clock rate
Most CPUs are synchronous circuits, which means they employ a clock signal to pace their sequential operations. The clock
signal is produced by an external oscillator circuit that generates a consistent number of pulses each second in the form of a
periodic square wave. The frequency of the clock pulses determines the rate at which a CPU executes instructions and,
consequently, the faster the clock, the more instructions the CPU will execute each second.

To ensure proper operation of the CPU, the clock period is longer than the maximum time needed for all signals to propagate
(move) through the CPU. In setting the clock period to a value well above the worst-case propagation delay, it is possible to
design the entire CPU and the way it moves data around the "edges" of the rising and falling clock signal. This has the advantage
of simplifying the CPU significantly, both from a design perspective and a component-count perspective. However, it also carries
the disadvantage that the entire CPU must wait on its slowest elements, even though some portions of it are much faster. This
limitation has largely been compensated for by various methods of increasing CPU parallelism (see below).

However, architectural improvements alone do not solve all of the drawbacks of globally synchronous CPUs. For example, a
clock signal is subject to the delays of any other electrical signal. Higher clock rates in increasingly complex CPUs make it more
difficult to keep the clock signal in phase (synchronized) throughout the entire unit. This has led many modern CPUs to require
multiple identical clock signals to be provided to avoid delaying a single signal significantly enough to cause the CPU to
malfunction. Another major issue, as clock rates increase dramatically, is the amount of heat that is dissipated by the CPU. The
constantly changing clock causes many components to switch regardless of whether they are being used at that time. In general, a
component that is switching uses more energy than an element in a static state. Therefore, as clock rate increases, so does energy
consumption, causing the CPU to require more heat dissipation in the form of CPU cooling solutions.

One method of dealing with the switching of unneeded components is called clock gating, which involves turning off the clock
signal to unneeded components (effectively disabling them). However, this is often regarded as difficult to implement and
therefore does not see common usage outside of very low-power designs. One notable recent CPU design that uses extensive
clock gating is the IBM PowerPC-based Xenon used in the Xbox 360; that way, power requirements of the Xbox 360 are greatly
reduced.[72] Another method of addressing some of the problems with a global clock signal is the removal of the clock signal
altogether. While removing the global clock signal makes the design process considerably more complex in many ways,
asynchronous (or clockless) designs carry marked advantages in power consumption and heat dissipation in comparison with
similar synchronous designs. While somewhat uncommon, entire asynchronous CPUs have been built without using a global
clock signal. Two notable examples of this are the ARM compliant AMULET and the MIPS R3000 compatible MiniMIPS.

Rather than totally removing the clock signal, some CPU designs allow certain portions of the device to be asynchronous, such as
using asynchronous ALUs in conjunction with superscalar pipelining to achieve some arithmetic performance gains. While it is
not altogether clear whether totally asynchronous designs can perform at a comparable or better level than their synchronous
counterparts, it is evident that they do at least excel in simpler math operations. This, combined with their excellent power
consumption and heat dissipation properties, makes them very suitable for embedded computers.[73]

Integer range
Every CPU represents numerical values in a specific way. For example, some early digital computers represented numbers as
familiar decimal (base 10) numeral system values, and others have employed more unusual representations such as ternary (base
three). Nearly all modern CPUs represent numbers in binary form, with each digit being represented by some two-valued physical
quantity such as a "high" or "low" voltage.[f]

Related to numeric representation is the size and precision of integer numbers that a CPU can represent. In the case of a binary
CPU, this is measured by the number of bits (significant digits of a binary encoded integer) that the CPU can process in one
operation, which is commonly called word size, bit width, data path width, integer precision, or integer size. A CPU's integer size
 determines the range of integer values it can directly operate on.[g] For example,
an 8-bit CPU can directly manipulate integers represented by eight bits, which
have a range of 256 (28) discrete integer values.

A six-bit word containing the binary Integer range can also affect the number of memory locations the CPU can
encoded representation of decimal
directly address (an address is an integer value representing a specific memory
value 40. Most modern CPUs employ
location). For example, if a binary CPU uses 32 bits to represent a memory
word sizes that are a power of two,
for example 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits. address then it can directly address 232 memory locations. To circumvent this
limitation and for various other reasons, some CPUs use mechanisms (such as
bank switching) that allow additional memory to be addressed.

CPUs with larger word sizes require more circuitry and consequently are physically larger, cost more and consume more power
(and therefore generate more heat). As a result, smaller 4- or 8-bit microcontrollers are commonly used in modern applications
even though CPUs with much larger word sizes (such as 16, 32, 64, even 128-bit) are available. When higher performance is
required, however, the benefits of a larger word size (larger data ranges and address spaces) may outweigh the disadvantages. A
CPU can have internal data paths shorter than the word size to reduce size and cost. For example, even though the IBM
System/360 instruction set was a 32-bit instruction set, the System/360 Model 30 and Model 40 had 8-bit data paths in the
arithmetic logical unit, so that a 32-bit add required four cycles, one for each 8 bits of the operands, and, even though the
Motorola 68000 series instruction set was a 32-bit instruction set, the Motorola 68000 and Motorola 68010 had 16-bit data paths
in the arithmetic logical unit, so that a 32-bit add required two cycles.

To gain some of the advantages afforded by both lower and higher bit lengths, many instruction sets have different bit widths for
integer and floating-point data, allowing CPUs implementing that instruction set to have different bit widths for different portions
of the device. For example, the IBM System/360 instruction set was primarily 32 bit, but supported 64-bit floating point values to
facilitate greater accuracy and range in floating point numbers.[29] The System/360 Model 65 had an 8-bit adder for decimal and
fixed-point binary arithmetic and a 60-bit adder for floating-point arithmetic.[74] Many later CPU designs use similar mixed bit
width, especially when the processor is meant for general-purpose usage where a reasonable balance of integer and floating point
capability is required.

Parallelism
The description of the basic operation
of a CPU offered in the previous
section describes the simplest form
that a CPU can take. This type of
CPU, usually referred to as subscalar, Model of a subscalar CPU, in which it takes fifteen clock cycles to complete
operates on and executes one three instructions
instruction on one or two pieces of
data at a time, that is less than one
instruction per clock cycle (IPC < 1).

This process gives rise to an inherent inefficiency in subscalar CPUs. Since only one instruction is executed at a time, the entire
CPU must wait for that instruction to complete before proceeding to the next instruction. As a result, the subscalar CPU gets
"hung up" on instructions which take more than one clock cycle to complete execution. Even adding a second execution unit (see
below) does not improve performance much; rather than one pathway being hung up, now two pathways are hung up and the
number of unused transistors is increased. This design, wherein the CPU's execution resources can operate on only one
instruction at a time, can only possibly reach scalar performance (one instruction per clock cycle, IPC = 1). However, the
performance is nearly always subscalar (less than one instruction per clock cycle, IPC < 1).
Attempts to achieve scalar and better performance have resulted in a variety of design methodologies that cause the CPU to
behave less linearly and more in parallel. When referring to parallelism in CPUs, two terms are generally used to classify these
design techniques:

instruction-level parallelism (ILP), which seeks to increase the rate at which instructions are executed within a
CPU (that is, to increase the use of on-die execution resources);
task-level parallelism (TLP), which purposes to increase the number of threads or processes that a CPU can
execute simultaneously.
Each methodology differs both in the ways in which they are implemented, as well as the relative effectiveness they afford in
increasing the CPU's performance for an application.[h]

Instruction-level parallelism
One of the simplest methods used to accomplish increased
parallelism is to begin the first steps of instruction fetching
and decoding before the prior instruction finishes
executing. This is the simplest form of a technique known
as instruction pipelining, and is used in almost all modern
Basic five-stage pipeline. In the best case scenario, this general-purpose CPUs. Pipelining allows more than one
pipeline can sustain a completion rate of one instruction instruction to be executed at any given time by breaking
per clock cycle. down the execution pathway into discrete stages. This
separation can be compared to an assembly line, in which
an instruction is made more complete at each stage until it
exits the execution pipeline and is retired.

Pipelining does, however, introduce the possibility for a situation where the result of the previous operation is needed to complete
the next operation; a condition often termed data dependency conflict. To cope with this, additional care must be taken to check
for these sorts of conditions and delay a portion of the instruction pipeline if this occurs. Naturally, accomplishing this requires
additional circuitry, so pipelined processors are more complex than subscalar ones (though not very significantly so). A pipelined
processor can become very nearly scalar, inhibited only by pipeline stalls (an instruction spending more than one clock cycle in a
stage).

Further improvement upon the idea of instruction

pipelining led to the development of a method that
decreases the idle time of CPU components even further.
Designs that are said to be superscalar include a long
instruction pipeline and multiple identical execution units,
such as load-store units, arithmetic-logic units, floating-
point units and address generation units.[75] In a superscalar
pipeline, multiple instructions are read and passed to a
dispatcher, which decides whether or not the instructions
can be executed in parallel (simultaneously). If so they are
dispatched to available execution units, resulting in the A simple superscalar pipeline. By fetching and
ability for several instructions to be executed dispatching two instructions at a time, a maximum of two
instructions per clock cycle can be completed.
simultaneously. In general, the more instructions a
superscalar CPU is able to dispatch simultaneously to
waiting execution units, the more instructions will be completed in a given cycle.
Most of the difficulty in the design of a superscalar CPU architecture lies in creating an effective dispatcher. The dispatcher needs
to be able to quickly and correctly determine whether instructions can be executed in parallel, as well as dispatch them in such a
way as to keep as many execution units busy as possible. This requires that the instruction pipeline is filled as often as possible
and gives rise to the need in superscalar architectures for significant amounts of CPU cache. It also makes hazard-avoiding
techniques like branch prediction, speculative execution, register renaming, out-of-order execution and transactional memory
crucial to maintaining high levels of performance. By attempting to predict which branch (or path) a conditional instruction will
take, the CPU can minimize the number of times that the entire pipeline must wait until a conditional instruction is completed.
Speculative execution often provides modest performance increases by executing portions of code that may not be needed after a
conditional operation completes. Out-of-order execution somewhat rearranges the order in which instructions are executed to
reduce delays due to data dependencies. Also in case of single instruction stream, multiple data stream—a case when a lot of data
from the same type has to be processed—, modern processors can disable parts of the pipeline so that when a single instruction is
executed many times, the CPU skips the fetch and decode phases and thus greatly increases performance on certain occasions,
especially in highly monotonous program engines such as video creation software and photo processing.

In the case where a portion of the CPU is superscalar and part is not, the part which is not suffers a performance penalty due to
scheduling stalls. The Intel P5 Pentium had two superscalar ALUs which could accept one instruction per clock cycle each, but
its FPU could not accept one instruction per clock cycle. Thus the P5 was integer superscalar but not floating point superscalar.
Intel's successor to the P5 architecture, P6, added superscalar capabilities to its floating point features, and therefore afforded a
significant increase in floating point instruction performance.

Both simple pipelining and superscalar design increase a CPU's ILP by allowing a single processor to complete execution of
instructions at rates surpassing one instruction per clock cycle.[i] Most modern CPU designs are at least somewhat superscalar,
and nearly all general purpose CPUs designed in the last decade are superscalar. In later years some of the emphasis in designing
high-ILP computers has been moved out of the CPU's hardware and into its software interface, or ISA. The strategy of the very
long instruction word (VLIW) causes some ILP to become implied directly by the software, reducing the amount of work the
CPU must perform to boost ILP and thereby reducing the design's complexity.

Task-level parallelism
Another strategy of achieving performance is to execute multiple threads or processes in parallel. This area of research is known
as parallel computing.[76] In Flynn's taxonomy, this strategy is known as multiple instruction stream, multiple data stream
(MIMD).[77]

One technology used for this purpose was multiprocessing (MP).[78] The initial flavor of this technology is known as symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP), where a small number of CPUs share a coherent view of their memory system. In this scheme, each CPU
has additional hardware to maintain a constantly up-to-date view of memory. By avoiding stale views of memory, the CPUs can
cooperate on the same program and programs can migrate from one CPU to another. To increase the number of cooperating CPUs
beyond a handful, schemes such as non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and directory-based coherence protocols were
introduced in the 1990s. SMP systems are limited to a small number of CPUs while NUMA systems have been built with
thousands of processors. Initially, multiprocessing was built using multiple discrete CPUs and boards to implement the
interconnect between the processors. When the processors and their interconnect are all implemented on a single chip, the
technology is known as chip-level multiprocessing (CMP) and the single chip as a multi-core processor.

It was later recognized that finer-grain parallelism existed with a single program. A single program might have several threads (or
functions) that could be executed separately or in parallel. Some of the earliest examples of this technology implemented
input/output processing such as direct memory access as a separate thread from the computation thread. A more general approach
to this technology was introduced in the 1970s when systems were designed to run multiple computation threads in parallel. This
technology is known as multi-threading (MT). This approach is considered more cost-effective than multiprocessing, as only a
small number of components within a CPU is replicated to support MT as opposed to the entire CPU in the case of MP. In MT,
the execution units and the memory system including the caches are shared among multiple threads. The downside of MT is that
the hardware support for multithreading is more visible to software than that of MP and thus supervisor software like operating
systems have to undergo larger changes to support MT. One type of MT that was implemented is known as temporal
multithreading, where one thread is executed until it is stalled waiting for data to return from external memory. In this scheme,
the CPU would then quickly context switch to another thread which is ready to run, the switch often done in one CPU clock
cycle, such as the UltraSPARC T1. Another type of MT is simultaneous multithreading, where instructions from multiple threads
are executed in parallel within one CPU clock cycle.

For several decades from the 1970s to early 2000s, the focus in designing high performance general purpose CPUs was largely on
achieving high ILP through technologies such as pipelining, caches, superscalar execution, out-of-order execution, etc. This trend
culminated in large, power-hungry CPUs such as the Intel Pentium 4. By the early 2000s, CPU designers were thwarted from
achieving higher performance from ILP techniques due to the growing disparity between CPU operating frequencies and main
memory operating frequencies as well as escalating CPU power dissipation owing to more esoteric ILP techniques.

CPU designers then borrowed ideas from commercial computing markets such as transaction processing, where the aggregate
performance of multiple programs, also known as throughput computing, was more important than the performance of a single
thread or process.

This reversal of emphasis is evidenced by the proliferation of dual and more core processor designs and notably, Intel's newer
designs resembling its less superscalar P6 architecture. Late designs in several processor families exhibit CMP, including the x86-
64 Opteron and Athlon 64 X2, the SPARC UltraSPARC T1, IBM POWER4 and POWER5, as well as several video game console
CPUs like the Xbox 360's triple-core PowerPC design, and the PlayStation 3's 7-core Cell microprocessor.

Data parallelism
A less common but increasingly important paradigm of processors (and indeed, computing in general) deals with data parallelism.
The processors discussed earlier are all referred to as some type of scalar device.[j] As the name implies, vector processors deal
with multiple pieces of data in the context of one instruction. This contrasts with scalar processors, which deal with one piece of
data for every instruction. Using Flynn's taxonomy, these two schemes of dealing with data are generally referred to as single
instruction stream, multiple data stream (SIMD) and single instruction stream, single data stream (SISD), respectively. The great
utility in creating processors that deal with vectors of data lies in optimizing tasks that tend to require the same operation (for
example, a sum or a dot product) to be performed on a large set of data. Some classic examples of these types of tasks include
multimedia applications (images, video and sound), as well as many types of scientific and engineering tasks. Whereas a scalar
processor must complete the entire process of fetching, decoding and executing each instruction and value in a set of data, a
vector processor can perform a single operation on a comparatively large set of data with one instruction. This is only possible
when the application tends to require many steps which apply one operation to a large set of data.

Most early vector processors, such as the Cray-1, were associated almost exclusively with scientific research and cryptography
applications. However, as multimedia has largely shifted to digital media, the need for some form of SIMD in general-purpose
processors has become significant. Shortly after inclusion of floating-point units started to become commonplace in general-
purpose processors, specifications for and implementations of SIMD execution units also began to appear for general-purpose
processors. Some of these early SIMD specifications - like HP's Multimedia Acceleration eXtensions (MAX) and Intel's MMX -
were integer-only. This proved to be a significant impediment for some software developers, since many of the applications that
benefit from SIMD primarily deal with floating-point numbers. Progressively, developers refined and remade these early designs
into some of the common modern SIMD specifications, which are usually associated with one ISA. Some notable modern
examples include Intel's SSE and the PowerPC-related AltiVec (also known as VMX).[k]

Virtual CPUs
Cloud computing can involve subdividing CPU operation into virtual central processing units[79] (vCPUs[80]).

A host is the virtual equivalent of a physical machine, on which a virtual system is operating.[81] When there are several physical
machines operating in tandem and managed as a whole, the grouped computing and memory resources form a cluster. In some
systems, it is possible to dynamically add and remove from a cluster. Resources available at a host and cluster level can be
partitioned out into resources pools with fine granularity.

Performance
The performance or speed of a processor depends on, among many other factors, the clock rate (generally given in multiples of
hertz) and the instructions per clock (IPC), which together are the factors for the instructions per second (IPS) that the CPU can
perform.[82] Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few
branches, whereas realistic workloads consist of a mix of instructions and applications, some of which take longer to execute than
others. The performance of the memory hierarchy also greatly affects processor performance, an issue barely considered in MIPS
calculations. Because of these problems, various standardized tests, often called "benchmarks" for this purpose—such as SPECint
—have been developed to attempt to measure the real effective performance in commonly used applications.

Processing performance of computers is increased by using multi-core processors, which essentially is plugging two or more
individual processors (called cores in this sense) into one integrated circuit.[83] Ideally, a dual core processor would be nearly
twice as powerful as a single core processor. In practice, the performance gain is far smaller, only about 50%, due to imperfect
software algorithms and implementation.[84] Increasing the number of cores in a processor (i.e. dual-core, quad-core, etc.)
increases the workload that can be handled. This means that the processor can now handle numerous asynchronous events,
interrupts, etc. which can take a toll on the CPU when overwhelmed. These cores can be thought of as different floors in a
processing plant, with each floor handling a different task. Sometimes, these cores will handle the same tasks as cores adjacent to
them if a single core is not enough to handle the information.

Due to specific capabilities of modern CPUs, such as simultaneous multithreading and uncore, which involve sharing of actual
CPU resources while aiming at increased utilization, monitoring performance levels and hardware use gradually became a more
complex task.[85] As a response, some CPUs implement additional hardware logic that monitors actual use of various parts of a
CPU and provides various counters accessible to software; an example is Intel's Performance Counter Monitor technology.[3]

See also
Addressing mode List of instruction sets
AMD Accelerated Processing Unit Microprocessor
CISC Multi-core processor
Computer bus Protection ring
Computer engineering RISC
CPU core voltage Stream processing
CPU socket True Performance Index
Digital signal processor TPU
GPU Wait state
Hyper-threading

Notes
a. Integrated circuits are now used to implement all CPUs, except for a few machines designed to withstand large
electromagnetic pulses, say from a nuclear weapon.
b. The so-called "von Neumann" memo expounded the idea of stored programs,[64] which for example may be
stored on punched cards, paper tape, or magnetic tape.
 c. Some early computers, like the Harvard Mark I, did not support any kind of "jump" instruction, effectively limiting
the complexity of the programs they could run. It is largely for this reason that these computers are often not
considered to contain a proper CPU, despite their close similarity to stored-program computers.
d. Since the program counter counts memory addresses and not instructions, it is incremented by the number of
memory units that the instruction word contains. In the case of simple fixed-length instruction word ISAs, this is
always the same number. For example, a fixed-length 32-bit instruction word ISA that uses 8-bit memory words
would always increment the PC by four (except in the case of jumps). ISAs that use variable-length instruction
words increment the PC by the number of memory words corresponding to the last instruction's length.
e. Because the instruction set architecture of a CPU is fundamental to its interface and usage, it is often used as a
classification of the "type" of CPU. For example, a "PowerPC CPU" uses some variant of the PowerPC ISA. A
system can execute a different ISA by running an emulator.
f. The physical concept of voltage is an analog one by nature, practically having an infinite range of possible
values. For the purpose of physical representation of binary numbers, two specific ranges of voltages are
defined, one for logic '0' and another for logic '1'. These ranges are dictated by design considerations such as
noise margins and characteristics of the devices used to create the CPU.
g. While a CPU's integer size sets a limit on integer ranges, this can (and often is) overcome using a combination of
software and hardware techniques. By using additional memory, software can represent integers many
magnitudes larger than the CPU can. Sometimes the CPU's instruction set will even facilitate operations on
integers larger than it can natively represent by providing instructions to make large integer arithmetic relatively
quick. This method of dealing with large integers is slower than utilizing a CPU with higher integer size, but is a
reasonable trade-off in cases where natively supporting the full integer range needed would be cost-prohibitive.
See Arbitrary-precision arithmetic for more details on purely software-supported arbitrary-sized integers.
h. Neither ILP nor TLP is inherently superior over the other; they are simply different means by which to increase
CPU parallelism. As such, they both have advantages and disadvantages, which are often determined by the
type of software that the processor is intended to run. High-TLP CPUs are often used in applications that lend
themselves well to being split up into numerous smaller applications, so-called "embarrassingly parallel
problems". Frequently, a computational problem that can be solved quickly with high TLP design strategies like
symmetric multiprocessing takes significantly more time on high ILP devices like superscalar CPUs, and vice
versa.
i. Best-case scenario (or peak) IPC rates in very superscalar architectures are difficult to maintain since it is
impossible to keep the instruction pipeline filled all the time. Therefore, in highly superscalar CPUs, average
sustained IPC is often discussed rather than peak IPC.
j. Earlier the term scalar was used to compare the IPC count afforded by various ILP methods. Here the term is
used in the strictly mathematical sense to contrast with vectors. See scalar (mathematics) and Vector
(geometric).
k. Although SSE/SSE2/SSE3 have superseded MMX in Intel's general-purpose processors, later IA-32 designs still
support MMX. This is usually accomplished by providing most of the MMX functionality with the same hardware
that supports the much more expansive SSE instruction sets.

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External links
How Microprocessors Work (http://www.howstuffworks.com/microprocessor.htm) at HowStuffWorks.
25 Microchips that shook the world (http://spectrum.ieee.org/25chips) – an article by the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers.

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