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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, instruction scheduling is a compiler optimization used to improve instruction-level parallelism, which improves performance on machines with instruction pipelines. Put more simply, it tries to do the following without changing the meaning of the code:
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 ...
A hardware interrupt is a condition related to the state of the hardware that may be signaled by an external hardware device, e.g., an interrupt request (IRQ) line on a PC, or detected by devices embedded in processor logic (e.g., the CPU timer in IBM System/370), to communicate that the device needs attention from the operating system (OS) [7] or, if there is no OS, from the bare metal ...
When bit 15 of the opcode is set, it indicates that the 8-bit operand address in opcode bits 0–6 and 14 is extended to 16 bits using bits 0–7 of the following instruction word. Such instructions are written with an L prefix (LADD vs. ADD) and take an extra cycle to execute. [13]
Simultaneously, an entry is recorded in a second Matrix, which records the instruction order as a Directed Acyclic Graph. In order to avoid output dependencies (WAW) the instruction is stalled until instructions intending to write to the same register are completed. The instruction is also stalled when required functional units are currently busy.
The IRR specifies which interrupts are pending acknowledgement, and is typically a symbolic register which can not be directly accessed. The ISR register specifies which interrupts have been acknowledged, but are still waiting for an end of interrupt (EOI). The IMR specifies which interrupts are to be ignored and not acknowledged.
For example, hardware timers send interrupts to the CPU at regular intervals. Most operating systems execute a HLT instruction when there is no immediate work to be done, putting the processor into an idle state. In Windows NT, for example, this instruction is run in the "System Idle Process". On x86 processors, the opcode of HLT is 0xF4.