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General-Purpose Processors Overview

The document discusses the basic architecture of a general-purpose processor. It consists of a datapath, control unit, and tightly linked memory. The datapath contains an ALU for operations, registers for temporary storage, and internal/external data buses. Processors are distinguished by their bit-width, which determines the size of components like registers and buses. The control unit retrieves instructions from memory via a program counter and uses next-state logic to move data through the datapath according to instructions.

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Dhiraj Ippili
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109 views3 pages

General-Purpose Processors Overview

The document discusses the basic architecture of a general-purpose processor. It consists of a datapath, control unit, and tightly linked memory. The datapath contains an ALU for operations, registers for temporary storage, and internal/external data buses. Processors are distinguished by their bit-width, which determines the size of components like registers and buses. The control unit retrieves instructions from memory via a program counter and uses next-state logic to move data through the datapath according to instructions.

Uploaded by

Dhiraj Ippili
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Unit-2 General-Purpose Processors: Software

Introduction General-Purpose Processor Definition :Processor designed for a variety of computation tasks Low unit cost, in part because manufacturer spreads NRE over large numbers of units Motorola sold half a billion 68HC05 microcontrollers in 1996 alone

Carefully designed since higher NRE is acceptable Can yield good performance, size and power

Low NRE cost, short time-to-market/prototype, high flexibility User just writes software; no processor design

Basic Architecture

A General-Purpose Processor microprocessor

sometimes called CPU or

The architecture mainly consists of > Data path > Contol unit > Tightly linked memory Datapath
The datapath consists of the circuitry for transforming data and for storing temporary data

The datapath contains an arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) capable of


transforming data through operations such as addition, subtraction, logical AND, logical OR, inverting, and shifting. The datapath also contains registers capable of storing temporary data.

The internal data bus is the bus over which data travels within the datapath, while the externaldata bus is the bus over which data is brought to and from the data memory.

We typically distinguish processors by their size, and we usually


measure size as the bit-width of the datapath components.

An N-bit processor may have N-bit wide registers, an N-bit wide


ALU, an N-bit wide internal bus and an N-bit wide external bus

Common processor sizes include 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64bit processors.

Controller
The controller consists of circuitry for retrieving program instructions, and for moving data to, from, and through the data path according to those instructions. The controller consists of >Program Counter (PC): that holds the address in

memory of the next

program instruction to fetch The PCs bit-width represents the processors address size. The address size determines the no of directly accessible If the address size is M, then the address space is 2M. Thus, a processor with a 16-bit PC can directly address 216 = 65,536 memory locations. >Instruction Register (IR) :to hold the fetched instruction. > next-state logic: determines the next value of the PC.memory locations.

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