By : Gastón Tricárico St. Brendans school 2011

The processor is the computer's brain. It allows the processing of numeric data, meaning information entered in binary form, and the execution of instructions stored in memory.binary The first microprocessor was invented in It was a 4-bit calculation device with a speed of 108 kHz. Since then, microprocessor power has grown exponentially.

 The processor is an electronic circuit that operates at the speed of an internal clock thanks to a quartz crystal that, when subjected to an electrical currant, send pulses, called "peaks". The clock speed, corresponds to the number of pulses per second, written in Hertz (Hz).  A microprocessors power can thus be characterized by the number of instructions per second that it is capable of processing. MIPS (millions of instructions per second) is the unit used and corresponds to the processor frequency divided by the CPI. (Cycles per Instruction)

Instructions are stored in the main memory. An instruction has two fields:  the operation code, which represents the action that the processor must execute;  the operand code, which defines the parameters of the action. The operand code depends on the operation. It can be data or a memory address.  Operation Code Operand Field The number of bits in an instruction varies according to the type of data (between 1 and 4 8-bit bytes). Instructions can be grouped by category, of which the main ones are:  Memory Access : accessing the memory or transferring data between registers.  Arithmetic Operations : operations such as addition, subtraction, division or multiplication.  Logic Operations : operations such as AND, OR, NOT, EXCLUSIVE NOT, etc.  Control : sequence controls, conditional connections, etc.

When the processor executes instructions, data is temporarily stored in small, local memory locations of 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits called registers. Depending on the type of processor, the overall number of registers can vary from about ten to many hundreds.

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