Eli5: what is inside a cpu, and how does it perform thousands of calculations a second?
In: Technology
IMO the most interesting about a cpu is how it actually reads and executed instructions. It’s called the fetch, decode, execute cycle. It’s almost like the cpu is reading a book. Each line tells it an operation to perform (i.e. take this number and add 5 to it), then it goes to the next line and repeats. Some instructions might also say something like “if the thing in memory spot 1 is equal to 0, skip the next instruction line”.
The internal structure of modern CPUs is ridiculously complex and does so many really cool things, but at its core, it has hardware that tells it how to perform this cycle, hardware to do super basic math, hardware to remember things between instructions, and a special place to remember what line it should execute next.
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