I've been writing on CPU technology here at Ars for almost five years now, and during that time I've done my best to communicate computing concepts in as plain and accessible a manner as possible ...

In my previous article, Understanding the Microprocessor, I gave a high-level overview of what a microprocessor is and how it functions. I talked about the kinds of tasks it performs and the different ...

ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) is the fundamental unit of a microprocessor which performs all the basic operations based on the control input selection. There are separate units which work independent of ...

DLX is an open source microprocessor, it’s free and it has never been implemented in a commercial ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) design. The objective of this project is to use the ...

Increment and decrement. They sound like simple functions. But even the simplest functions can get quite complex in a microprocessor design. Ken Shirriff has written up a great blog post about his ...

The microprocessor (or 'processor', or 'CPU') is often called the brain of the computer, and for good reason. It's the backbone of any PC, smartphone, laptop, or tablet, performing billions of ...

The central processing unit (CPU) is either a dedicated integrated circuit (IC) or intellectual property (IP) core on an IC that processes logic and math. A CPU can handle high-level provisioning of ...