Name: The Evolution Of CPU Processing Power Part 1: The Mechanics Of A CPU
Uploaded: 2021-07-03T04:09:14.000Z
Duration: 14 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

During the mid 1960s a revolution in miniaturization was kick started.

The idea of packing dozens of semiconductor based transistors

on to a single silicon chip spawned the integrated circuit.

It laid the groundwork for a complete paradigm shift in how

In less than a decade, this marvel of electronic engineering

and materials sciences would lead in an era of advancement

incomparable to anything else in human history.

In the March of 1971, the commercial launch of a new

Composed of a then-incredible 2,300 transistors, the Intel 4004 central

Initially created as a custom solution to the Japanese company Busicom Corp.

for use in the Busicom 141-PF calculator, it was released later

With prophetic irony, the marketing material for

“Announcing a new era in integrated electronics”.

But what made the Intel 4004 so groundbreaking?

Take calculator and solve any simply arithmetic operation,

What we just did was issue a computer an instruction.

Instructions are elementally operations, such as math

Every computer program ever made, from web browsers, to apps, to video

games is composed of millions of these instructions.

The 4004 was capable of executing between 46,250 to

For comparison, ENIAC, the first electronic computer built just 25

years earlier could only execute 5,000 instructions a second.

But what made the 4004 so powerful wasn't just its 1800%

increase in processing power - it only consumed 1 watt of

electricity, was about ¾” long and cost $5 to produce in today's money.

This was miles ahead of ENIAC's, cost of $5.5 million

in today's money, 180kW power consumption and 27 ton weight.

Fast forward to September 2017, the launch date of

This CPU is capable of performing over 80 billion instructions

a second, a 900,000 time increase in processing power.

In this 2 part series we explore the engineering and behind the scenes

technology that paved the way for that simple 16 pin chip to evolve

This is the evolution of processing power.

In order to understand how a CPU derives its processing power, let

examine what a CPU actually does and how it interfaces with data.

In digital electronics everything is represented by the binary “bit”.

It's an elemental representation of two possible states.

A bit can represent a zero or one, true or false, up or down, on or

In a CPU, a “bit” is physically transmitted as voltage levels.

If we combine multiple “bits” together in a group, we can now represent

For example, if we combine eight bits together we form

A byte can represent 256 different states and can be

In the case of a byte, any number between 0 and 255 can be expressed.

But in a CPU, how we choose to represent data

That same byte, can also represent a number between -128 to 127.

Other expressions of that byte may be colors or levels of sound.

When we combine multiple bytes together, we create

Words are expressed in their bit capacity.

A 64-bit word contains 64 bits and so on.

When processors are created, the native word size it operates on

The original Intel 4004 processor operated on a 4-bit word.

This means data moving through the CPU transits in

Modern CPUs are typical 64-bit, however 32-bit processors

By making use of larger word sizes we can represent more discrete states

A 32-bit word for example, can represent up to 4.2

Of all the forms data can take inside of a CPU the most important

Instructions are unique bits of data, that are decoded and

An example of a common instruction would be to add two words

values together or move a word of data from one location in

The entire list of instructions a CPU supports is called

Each instruction's binary representation, its machine

code is typically assigned a human readable presentation

If we look at the instruction set of most CPU's, they all tend to

focus around performing math or logical operations on data, testing

conditions or moving it from one location to another in memory.

For all intents and purposes, we can think of a CPU as an

They operate by looping through three basic steps,

As CPU designs evolve these three step become dramatically more complicated

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The Evolution Of CPU Processing Power Part 1: The Mechanics Of A CPU

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