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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Microprocessor

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Introduction Microprocessors are the heart of many systems today. They are used not only used in desktop and laptop computers, but also in many systems we use in our lives on a daily basis, such as elevators, automobiles and traffic signals. In this essay, I will give an overview of the internals of microprocessors followed by techniques used to speed up microprocessor before answering the question -- why do modern processors with slower clock speeds have greater processing power. Components of a Microprocessor A microprocessor is a device that reads, modifies and writes a sequence of numbers according to a fixed set of rules called instruction. To aid this read-modify-write sequence, the microprocessor has a number of key components, described …show more content…

The Random Access Memory also known as RAM Stores a relatively large part of the application which is about to be sent to the Register and then onto the ALU. BUS To move the data from the memory (RAM) to registers, buses are used. There are two types of buses - address bus and data bus. The address bus is used to indicate the memory address to read or write from while the actual data travels on the data bus. Usually, the buses are as wide as the register width. This allows data and addresses to be transferred efficiently in a single instruction. Instruction A program consists of a set of instructions that is decoded and executed. An instruction consists of an opcode and a set of operands. The opcode is a code for operators. The opcode indicates what kind of instruction it is, for example an add opcode indicates that an addition needs to be performed on the operands. Instructions have a fixed length, for example four bytes or a word. The instruction format reserves some number of bits for the opcode and the remaining for the …show more content…

Memory Instruction There are two types of instructions - Load and Store instructions. Load instructions load data from the RAM to the register while store instructions store data into RAM. The load and store instructions tend to be much slower than arithmetic instructions causing a slowdown of the CPU. A lot of techniques are used to speed up these instructions, some of which will be described later. Branch Instruction There are two types of branches - conditional branches and unconditional branches. In an unconditional branch, the operand of a branch is the target address to jump to. The unconditional branch instruction is executed by the control unit by simply copying the target of the branch into the program counter. For a conditional branch, the processors typically set a bit called the Program Status Word (PSW) to 1 if the condition in an arithmetic instruction evaluates to true. The branch instruction that follows the arithmetic instruction checks to see if the PSW is set to 1, and if so, jumps to the target address. Otherwise, it continues to execute at the next instruction following the jump

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