Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The instruction cycle (also known as the fetch–decode–execute cycle, or simply the fetch–execute cycle) is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions. It is composed of three main stages: the fetch stage, the decode stage, and the execute stage.
In computer science, the fetch-and-add (FAA) CPU instruction atomically increments the contents of a memory location by a specified value. That is, fetch-and-add performs the following operation: increment the value at address x by a, where x is a memory location and a is some value, and return the original value at x.
In computer science, read–modify–write is a class of atomic operations (such as test-and-set, fetch-and-add, and compare-and-swap) that both read a memory location and write a new value into it simultaneously, either with a completely new value or some function of the previous value.
In computer engineering, instruction pipelining is a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. Pipelining attempts to keep every part of the processor busy with some instruction by dividing incoming instructions into a series of sequential steps (the eponymous "pipeline") performed by different processor units with different parts of instructions ...
Execution in computer and software engineering is the process by which a computer or virtual machine interprets and acts on the instructions of a computer program.Each instruction of a program is a description of a particular action which must be carried out, in order for a specific problem to be solved.
In computer architecture, cycles per instruction (aka clock cycles per instruction, clocks per instruction, or CPI) is one aspect of a processor's performance: the average number of clock cycles per instruction for a program or program fragment. [1] It is the multiplicative inverse of instructions per cycle.
Cache prefetching can be accomplished either by hardware or by software. [3]Hardware based prefetching is typically accomplished by having a dedicated hardware mechanism in the processor that watches the stream of instructions or data being requested by the executing program, recognizes the next few elements that the program might need based on this stream and prefetches into the processor's ...
The MAR register is half of a minimal interface between a microprogram and computer storage; the other half is a MDR. In general, MAR is a parallel load register that contains the next memory address to be manipulated, for example the next address to be read or written.