Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

Conclusion

This chapter began with some basics of computation: computers work with instructions (opcodes) and data (operands). As these are fed into the CPU, the CPU goes through a standard series of operations—fetch, decode, execute, store. However, although these basics apply to all CPUs, there is considerable diversity after that. If the CPU is thought of in terms of the standard desktop system, we can observe that there have been considerable changes in architecture over a fairly short period of time.

The original complex instruction set (CISC) design has given way to one that uses, at least to some extent, a reduced instruction set (RISC) approach. Other organizational changes include the addition of multiple pipelines (superscalar) and ...