Evaluate Systems Architecture

Evaluate Systems Architecture
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Abstract

The CPU is the brain of the computer. Throughout the evolution of computers, various inventors have come up with different architectures and designs for CPUs. It has to be connected to the rest of the components of a computer and communicates with them through signals carried by buses on the system board. This papers examines the organization and interconnection of the CPU and the rest of the components

Table of Contents Abstract 1 CPU 1 VLIW (very long instruction word) and EPIC (Explicitly parallel instruction computer) 2 Main memory 3 Registers 3 Program counter 3 Instruction register 3 Memory address register and memory data register 3 Multiprocessing 4 References 4

CPU
A CPU can be described using various characteristics. These include the memory addressing techniques, type of registers and their number, the design of its instruction set and others. Over the evolution of computers, many architectures have come up. The most important and the basis of modern computers is the Von Neumann architecture. Some of the household names in CPU architecture include Intel, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
The Von Neumann architecture identified the CPU to be made of three main components. These are the control unit, arithmetic & logic unit and the memory. The kind of memory used on CPUs has to be fast speed and is limited in size. These are the registers. Below is the Von Neumann architecture on which all other architectures are based;

Traditionally, CPUs did not have many registers and comprised numerous memory addressing techniques. However, after intensive research, it was found that these features made the computers less efficient. Major issues included rare use of specialized instructions, increased the frequency of memory access due to few general-purpose registers. This feature