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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.
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 ...
In interrupt-driven processors, this instruction halts the CPU until an external interrupt is received. On most architectures, executing such an instruction allows the processor to significantly reduce its power usage and heat output, which is why it is commonly used instead of busy waiting for sleeping and idling.
The processor completes the current instruction but does not change the registers or memory in any way—the computational results of the completed instruction are discarded. An abort interrupt does not literally abort an instruction. [2] The program bank (PB, see above) is pushed to the stack.
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 ...
Memory Reference (Two-cycle latency). All loads from memory. During the execute stage, the ALU added the two arguments (a register and a constant offset) to produce a virtual address by the end of the cycle. Multi-cycle Instructions (Many cycle latency). Integer multiply and divide and all floating-point operations. During the execute stage ...
BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction - the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden ...
INT is an assembly language instruction for x86 processors that generates a software interrupt. It takes the interrupt number formatted as a byte value. [1] When written in assembly language, the instruction is written like this: INT X. where X is the software interrupt that should be generated (0-255).