An integral part of any computer is the central processing unit. The evolution of electronics has resulted in modern processors being extremely complex devices. However, each of them contains parts that carry a similar functional purpose.
The core component of any processor is the core. It contains all the functions of executing commands and processing data received from RAM. The processor core is the most complex component, but several independent units can be distinguished in its structure, such as sampling and storage devices, branch prediction, decoding and instruction execution units.
The components of the processor core, which are responsible for the full cycle of fetching and executing instructions, are combined into pipelines to improve overall performance. Modern processors usually have multiple pipelines.
Most of the operations with data in the processor are performed on the arithmetic logic unit. The data itself (both initial and final) is stored in the register block. There are general-purpose registers intended mainly for arithmetic operations, segment registers involved in addressing, as well as special registers that affect the operation of the processor.
A mathematical coprocessor can be singled out as a separate part of the computing core of the processor. This is a component specially designed to speed up the processing of real numbers. The coprocessor originally existed as a separate module, but today it is ubiquitously integrated into the kernel.
An important component of modern processors is the branch prediction unit. It allows you to start decoding a sequence of commands on one of the pipelines even before the jump command is executed on the other. The introduction of this technology has made it possible to significantly increase the performance.
Almost all modern processors contain some amount of cache memory. The cache serves to minimize the number of calls to RAM, which are extremely slow compared to the processing speed inside the processor. Usually the cache is divided into several levels. The first level cache is the fastest, but also the smallest in size. It is located on the same crystal as the core. Higher tier caches hold more data, but are slower.
