Microprocessor

Introduction
Also known as central processing unit A computation engine fabricated on a chip Does the computation of your Desktop, laptop, server etc. Few examples
Pentium, K6, PowerPC, Sparc

They all do approximately the same thing approximately the same way

First microprocessor

Intel 4004 Introduced in 1971 Not very powerful

Did just addition and subtraction

4 bits at a time Powered the first portable electronic calculator

Prior to microprocessors

Computers were built either from collection of chips Or discrete components such as transistors Big in size

Life of Microprocessor
Different form life of pi First microprocessor to be used in a computer was 8080 introduced in 1974 8088 (1979) incorporated in the IBM PC (came into market in 1982)

Then the journey was from 8088 to 80286 to 80386 to 80486 to Pentium to Pentium II to Pentium III to Pentium 4 and so on
The Pentium 4 executes any piece of code that 8088 did but only 5000 times faster

 Here in the next slide are the differences between various microprocessors launched till the 2004

Compiled from the Intel Microprocessor Quick Reference Guide and TSCP Benchmark Scores

The parameters of differentiation

Well you know date!! Transistors: no of transistors on the chip increased by 20833.33333 times from the beginning till 2004 Microns: the width of the smallest wire on the chip in microns
If you are interested the human hair is 100 micron thick
And the wire on the Pentium 4 Prescott in 0.09 microns

Theres more
Clock Speed: max speed at which the chip can be clocked, will explain this a little more a little later ( from 2 MHz to 3.6 GHz) Data Width: is the width of the ALU (i.e. Arithmetic Logical Unit) 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit or 64 bit usually the external data bus is also of the same width MIPS: Millions of Instructions per second generally used to measure the performance of the CPU
But modern CPUs do so many different things that the rating lose a lot of their meaning

What is a Chip?

Well both of them are.. But dont eat the one on the left

A Chip: Definition

A chip is also called an integrated circuit. Generally it is a small, thin piece of silicon onto which the transistors making up the microprocessor have been etched. A chip might be as large as an inch on a side and can contain tens of millions of transistors. Simpler processors might consist of a few thousand transistors etched onto a chip just a few millimeters square.

Logic!!

Three basic activities of a microprocessor

ALU to perform mathematical operations

Moving data from one memory location to another

Make decisions and jump to new set of instructions based on the decisions

A microprocessor has
An address bus (that may be 8, 16 or 32 bits wide) that sends an address to memory A data bus (that may be 8, 16 or 32 bits wide) that can send data to memory or receive data from memory An RD (read) and WR (write) line to tell the memory whether it wants to set or get the addressed location A clock line that lets a clock pulse sequence the processor A reset line that resets the program counter to zero (or whatever) and restarts execution

 Registers A, B and C are simply latches made out of flip-flops

The program counter is a latch with the extra ability to increment by 1 when told to do so, and also to reset to zero when told to do so. The ALU could be as simple as an 8-bit adder or it might be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide 8-bit values The test register is a special latch that can hold values from comparisons performed in the ALU. An ALU can normally compare two numbers and determine if they are equal, if one is greater than the other, etc. The test register can also normally hold a carry bit from the last stage of the adder. It stores these values in flip-flops and then the instruction decoder can use the values to make decisions. There are six boxes marked "3-State" in the diagram. These are tri-state buffers. A tri-state buffer can pass a 1, a 0 or it can essentially disconnect its output (imagine a switch that totally disconnects the output line from the wire that the output is heading toward). A tri-state buffer allows multiple outputs to connect to a wire, but only one of them to actually drive a 1 or a 0 onto the line. The instruction register and instruction decoder are responsible for controlling all of the other components.

Microprocessor Memory

ROM: read-only memory chip is programmed with a permanent collection of pre-set bytes.
The address bus tells the ROM chip which byte to get and place on the data bus. When the RD line changes state, the ROM chip presents the selected byte onto the data bus. On a PC also known as BIOS (Basic Input / Output System)

Theres more

RAM: random-access memory contains bytes of information, and the microprocessor can read or write to those bytes depending on whether the RD or WR line is signalled
RAM chips forget everything once the power goes off the reason why we need the need ROM.

When you start your PC

When the microprocessor starts, it begins executing instructions it finds in the BIOS BIOS do things like test the hardware in the machine, and then it goes to the hard disk to fetch the boot sector. This boot sector is another small program, and the BIOS stores it in RAM after reading it off the disk The microprocessor then begins executing the boot sector's instructions from RAM. The boot sector program will tell the microprocessor to fetch something else from the hard disk into RAM, which the microprocessor then executes, and so on

Microprocessor Instructions
Everything is in bit pattern i.e. 0 and 1 Nobody is particularly good at remembering these patterns So we give different words to represent different patterns

this collection of words is the assembly language

So now you need an assembler, that translates the words into the bit patterns

64-bit Microprocessors
64 bit processors have been with us since 1992 and are now the mainstream Both Intel and AMD have introduced 64-bit chips, and the Mac G5 sports a 64-bit processor 64 bit processors have 64-bit ALUs, 64-bit registers, 64bit buses and so on.

64 bit processor just enlarged address spaces, 32 bit chips are often constrained to a maximum of 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM access which is good.
A 64-bit chip has a 64-bit RAM address space which is 2^64 bytes of RAM is something on the order of a billion gigabytes of RAM.

AMD 64 bit processor

Multi core microprocessor

A multi-core processor is simply a single chip that contain more than one microprocessor core. Multiple cores can run multiple instructions at the same time, increasing overall speed.

Examples

Dual-core processor -MD Phenom II X2, Intel Core Duo), Quad-core processor AMD Phenom II X4, Intel's quadcore processors, see i3, i5, and i7 Hexa-core processor AMD Phenom II X6, Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 980X Octa-core processor Intel Xeon E7-2820, AMD FX8150).

Hyper-threading
Hyper-threading is used to improve parallelization of computations performed on PC microprocessors. It first appeared in Feb 2002 on Xeon server processors and in Nov 2002 on Pentium 4. The main function of hyper-threading is to decrease the number of dependent instructions on the pipeline. For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual cores, and shares the workload between them when possible. Thus the OS can schedule two processes at once. In addition two or more processes can use the same resources

Development of multi-core processor

Performance improvement by shrinking the area of IC were restrained by physical limitations of semiconductor based microelectronics. Rate of clock rate improvement slowed. OPTION Improve overall processing performance by increased use of parallel computing in the form of multi-core processor Multiple cores were used on the same CPU chip, which could then lead to better sales of CPU chips with two or more cores

More technical factors

The memory wall. Increasing gap between processor and memory speed. The ILP wall . The increasing difficulty in keeping a high-performance single-core processor busy. The power wall. The trend of consuming increasing power with increase of operating frequency

Advantages of multi-core processing

Multiple cores on the same die allowed the circuitry to operate at a much higher clock-rate than is possible if the signals have to travel off-chip. The multi-core CPU designs require much less PCB space than do multi-chip designs.
Dual-core processor uses slightly less power than two coupled single-core processors.

Disadvantages
Maximizing the utilization of the computing resources provided by multi-core processors requires adjustments both to the OS support and to existing application software. Integration of a multi-core chip drives chip production yields down and they are more difficult to manage thermally than lower-density single-chip designs.

Further group 7 would discuss