Question

A. What are major Components inside a CPU chip? Briefly explain them??

B. List and describe four attributes used to rate a CPU??

Answer 1

A) There are 3 major components inside a CPU chip namely ALU, CU, and Registers.

ALU: It stands for arithmetic and logical unit and performs all the arithmetic and logical calculations/instructions in the programs.

CU: It stands for control unit and it performs all the instruction fetching, synchronization and all the management work of the chip.

Registers: the are extremely fast memory unit used to store temporary results of the calculations.

B) The attributes used to rate a CPU are-

1. Clock speed: It is measured in cycles per second or hertz it gives a basic idea of how fast the chip is and how many basic CPU instructions it can fetch in 1 second. nowadays CPU speeds are of the order of GHz.
2. size of cache: cache help us fetch CPU instructions faster than main memory it temporarily stores most used instructions and helps speed up the fetching process the bigger the cache the more instructions could be accessed quickly. cache's size varies from few KBs to few MBs
3. size of address bus: size of address bus determines how much maximum main memory(RAM) can be attached to the cpu. more ram means faster execution of the programs. Modern processor has 64-bit address bus.
4. number of cores: cores is the number of independent CPUs in the chip and more instructions/ program could be run in parallel and hence faster overall execution. Today's CPUs come with as many as 8 cores.