Edit: I don’t think I worded this right, how do we create CPU’s? How do they know they’re the brain of the entire operation? If that makes my question easier to comprehend.
In: Technology
CPUs are designed around their instruction set architectures (ISA). To create an ISA, the designer decides what instructions the CPU will be able to execute, how those instructions are going to be read and interpreted, and what more advanced features they are going to provide. It’s a fairly common 2nd/3rd year group project for computer engineers to design a simple CPU this way.
More generally, think of a CPU as a cook, and the programs they run as a recipe. The CPU will go through the programs line by line, doing what each instruction tell them to do. The ISA describes how the recipes have to be formatted and what the recipes can tell the cook to do.
Now, in a large modern computer, the CPU is more of a head cook, and most of it’s job is to assign individual parts of the recipes to the lesser cooks in the kitchen. However, the rules for doing so are all part of the design and they influence how the ISA is structured as well and at the heart, the CPU is still just going through the recipe line by line until it is done. It’s just that the recipes are a lot more complex and getting the timing right so everything gets done when it is suppose to is extremely hard.
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