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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 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 ...
Prefetching in computer science is a technique for speeding up fetch operations by beginning a fetch operation whose result is expected to be needed soon. Usually this is before it is known to be needed, so there is a risk of wasting time by prefetching data that will not be used.
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 ...
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 a Von Neumann architecture which uses the program counter (PC) register to determine the current instruction being fetched in the pipeline, to prevent new instructions from being fetched when an instruction in the decoding stage has been stalled, the value in the PC register and the instruction in the fetch stage are preserved to prevent ...
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.