The processor, also known as the CPU or micro, is the brain of the PC . Its main functions include managing the operating system, running applications and coordinating the different devices that make up the team.
In the physical aspect, it is nothing more than a small silicon tablet which is covered with what we call encapsulation. This is inserted into the motherboard on a connector called a socket , although this is not always the case, in a laptop or notebook it is normal for it to be soldered directly. There are three packaging models, PGA, LGA and BGA .
The board thus becomes in charge of the connection with the other devices, such as RAM memory , the graphics card or the hard drive using a set of circuits and chips that you find on it, which we call a chipset .
From a historical point of view, the processor is one of the elements of the PC that has evolved the most, both in its manufacturing process and in its architecture internal .
Thanks to these improvements, it has been possible to include more functional blocks inside. At first it was the memory controller, then the graphics card and in the very near future, we will go from the concept of processor to what is called SOC, that is, a chip with all the elements of the motherboard inside it, thus improving size and reducing consumption.
Table of Contents
What components does a processor have?
Keep in mind that not all of them are the same, but most of them include, among other elements:
Cores
A core is nothing more than a miniature processor. Modern processors have several of them which means that they can speed up certain types of applications and avoid crashes.
Cache
The cache memory is the element of the memory system of a PC that is inside the micro, it is used to accelerate the speed of the accesses to the RAM.
The cache is, in turn, organized into several levels, each one slower and larger than the previous one. It will be the task of the micro to leave the data that is most used as close as possible in order to speed up the execution of the programs.
memory controller
This was one of the first elements that was integrated, managing to speed up access to RAM memory. This has a drawback and that is that you can only use the type of memory for which your processor is prepared.
This has not always been the case since before the type of memory you could use depended on the motherboard and it was not uncommon for the motherboard to be prepared to work with various types of RAM.
Graphic card
If they integrate this component, we are no longer talking about CPUs but about APUs . We would no longer be facing a conventional micro but rather a hybrid between processor and graphics card. At present and it seems that in future developments almost all the micros that you will come across will be of this type.
Other elements
The micros have incorporated even more functionality than was previously found on the motherboard. controller For example, the PCI Express , increasing the speed with which the micro is able to communicate with other devices.
More information about these elements in parts of the processor .
How does a processor work?
The whole system is governed by a clock that is used to synchronize the different functional blocks. The speed at which it changes state is called the operating frequency and is related to the computing capacity of the system.
The operation of a processor can be divided into the following stages:
read an instruction from memory
The instruction set of any current processor includes more than a thousand different ones and is growing over time. They are added to improve the processing speed of certain applications.
The data is sought
Some instructions will need data to carry out their calculations that may not be found within the processor and will therefore have to be found in the memory system.
The operation is performed
Once everything is done, the operation is executed. This may require the work of various blocks such as the logical arithmetic unit or the floating point unit.
Goes to the next instruction
Which is not always the next one in memory. Many instructions can change the flow of the program and allow jumps or repeat certain actions until a certain condition is met.
One of the most used techniques to increase speed includes executing instructions out of order trying to optimize the use of functional blocks. In these processors, the operations are executed when their data is there and not in the order in which they were written. This of course leads to a more complex architecture that must control that the results are consistent.
Another improvement is the jump predictor. This element tries to guess whether a fork in the code is going to occur in a certain operation or not. This way you can execute the instructions of a given branch even before you know if a branch is going to occur.
All these techniques try to improve the IPC, that is, the processor’s ability to execute more instructions in the same amount of time.
What should I take into account when buying a processor?
It will be your needs that ultimately decide which processor you should buy. Acquiring a PC to study is not the same as to play , to give you two examples.
As technical characteristics, what differentiates one micro from another are, among others, its operating frequency, its amount of cache memory and its number of cores.
Among these other technologies we find:
Hyperthreading
Thanks to Hyperthread technology, which is typical of Intel micros, it is possible to simulate that you have two logical cores on one physical one. It is interesting for certain applications like those that deal with graphics and videos.
CMT
CMT is an AMD technology that allows joining two cores and sharing certain resources so that they occupy less area and therefore include a greater number of them.
Turbo Boost y Turbo Core
Turbo Boost and Turbo Core are two technologies, the first from Intel and the second from AMD capable of accelerating processors when they do not consume much.
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