The Processor Core

The processor core is responsible for the following:

  • Instruction fetch.

  • Branch prediction.

  • Parsing of the IA instruction stream to determine the boundaries between IA instructions.

  • Decoding of IA instructions into μops.

  • Mapping accesses to the IA data register set to a larger physical register set.

  • Dispatch, execution and retirement of μops.

Get The Unabridged Pentium 4 IA32 Processor Genealogy now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.