Processors
Jamie Tees
The processor is the most important part of any computer, it’s basically the “brain” of the computer
and instructs the computer to do various tasks, the modern processor does many trillions upon
trillions of complex calculations.
There are two main manufacturers of computer processor manufacturers:
 Intel
 AMD
Intel dominates the computer processor market with AMD closely behind.
Intel
 Was awarded the contract by IBM to provide CPU’s to the IBM PC in 1980
^This caused Intel to basically have a monopoly and Motorola, MOS Technology and Zilog
slowly faded away as they could not compete.
 Produces multiple CPU’s of their own design for Servers, Laptops, Desktops and
Smartphones / Tablets.
 Intel’s current high-end processors are sold under the Core branding (i3, i5, i7)
 Other brands such as Celeron, Pentium are used for Desktop’s and Laptops
 The atom brand is produced for smaller devices such as netbooks, smartphones and tablets
 Very high-end server processors are manufactured under the Xeon and Itanium branding.
 Intel CPU’s use less power than AMD due to the manufacturing process on Intel CPU’s being
smaller nm
AMD
 Produces great budget CPU’s, this keeps Intel on it’s toes.
 AMD also produces graphics, thanks to the recent takeover of ATI
 AMD used to clone Intel CPU’s for Intel. After a few years Intel got rid of AMD and AMD had
to use their own pin layouts
 AMD produces processors for Servers, Laptops, Desktops and netbooks
 Desktop PC’s use the Phenom II, A-Series, Phenom, Athlon X2, Anthlon II, Sempron and FX
CPU’s
 Laptop PC’s normally use Turion CPU’s
 Servers normally use Opteron, or FX CPU’s
Clock Multipliers
 Originally CPU’s run at the speed of the bus
 Engineers realized the CPU was the only thing doing any work most of the time
 Engineers realized they could speed up the internal operations of the CPU without having to
speed up anything else. This would speed up the entire computing process
 Intel has a feature called Speed step that can drop the clock multiplier to use less power if
it’s not required.
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Processors
Jamie Tees
 Originally the clock speed and the multiplier had to be manually configured via jumpers or
by dual in-line package (DIP_ switches on the mother board.
^ Nowadays, CPU’s report to the motherboard through something called CPUID and the
speed / multiplier are automatically setup.
64 – Bit
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All new CPU’s support 64-bit processing, meaning they can run a compatible 64 bit OS
They can also support 32 bit processing
Main benefit is to be able to use more than 4 GB of RAM
Able to handle 16 EB of RAM theoretically
x64 means 64 Bit. x86 means 32 Bit, to make things annoying a 64 bit processor is still
classed as an x86 processor.
Parallel Execution and Other Stuff :P (Yes I said stuff)
CPU’s can process multiple commands in parallel, known as parallel execution. Older processors had
to do everything in a linear fashion.
 Pipelining is the method a CPU uses to get a command from the databus, to do a calculation
and get the answer back to the databus.
o Fetch (gets data from the external databus)
o Decode (Figure out what needs to be executed)
o Execute (Perform the certain calculation)
o Write (Send the data back to the external databus)
 Cache is a part of the CPU that uses very fast memory to store data temporarily during the
processing stage. CPU’s normally have 3 caches called the L1 cache, the L2 cache and the L3
cache. This cache uses a type of RAM called static RAM.
o L1 Cache, found on the same die as the processor core
o L2 Cache is found closest to the processor but not on the same die.
o L3 Cache is shared among all cores of the CPU.
 Hyperthreading allows a processor to run multiple threads at the same thread, which is
generically called simultaneous multithreading. This basically turns one CPU in to two CPU’s
on one chip. This only is supported if the OS / and the application have been designed to be
ran with multithreading.
 Multicore processing is where a CPU uses 2 or more cpu cores to process data.
 Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) this memory controller as moved from the
motherboard to the CPU in recent years to enable optimize the flow of information in and
out of the CPU, it also allows faster control over things like a large L3 cache shared among
multiple cores.
 Integrated Graphics Processing Unit is basically a GPU on the CPU chip.
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