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English: Block diagram of a hypothetical simple CPU, showing instruction fetch, decode, data registers, ALU, and memory interface, and major relationships. Español: Diagrama de una hipotética y simple "Unidad Central de Proceso" (CPU), mostrando la captura de una instrucción y su decodificación, así como los registros de datos, la "Unidad ...
In the mid-1990s, a facility for supplying new microcode was initially referred to as the Pentium Pro BIOS Update Feature. [18] [19] It was intended that user-mode applications should make a BIOS interrupt call to supply a new "BIOS Update Data Block", which the BIOS would partially validate and save to nonvolatile BIOS memory; this could be supplied to the installed processors on next boot.
The IBM Future Systems project and Data General Fountainhead Processor are examples of this. During the 1970s, CPU speeds grew more quickly than memory speeds and numerous techniques such as memory block transfer, memory pre-fetch and multi-level caches were used to alleviate this. High-level machine instructions, made possible by microcode ...
The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine.While building the computer Z1 in 1936, Konrad Zuse described in two patent applications for his future projects that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data, i.e., the stored-program concept.
An exception is when a processor is designed to use a particular bytecode directly as its machine code, such as is the case with Java processors. Machine code and assembly code are sometimes called native code when referring to platform-dependent parts of language features or libraries.
Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to instruction set architectures that are designed to exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). A VLIW processor allows programs to explicitly specify instructions to execute in parallel, whereas conventional central processing units (CPUs) mostly allow programs to specify instructions to execute in sequence only.
The CPU microcode includes a debugger: firmware with a direct serial interface (RS-232 or current loop) to a terminal. This lets the operator do debugging by typing commands and reading octal numbers, rather than operating switches and reading lights, the typical debugging method at the time.
In early processors, the TSC was a cycle counter, incrementing by 1 for each clock cycle (which could cause its rate to vary on processors that could change clock speed at runtime) – in later processors, it increments at a fixed rate that doesn't necessarily match the CPU clock speed. [n] Usually 3 [o] Intel Pentium, AMD K5, Cyrix 6x86MX ...