We all think of the CPU as the "brains" of a computer, but what does that actually mean? What is going on inside with the billions of transistors that make your computer work? In this four-part series ...

From the CPU’s perspective, a thread (short for “thread of execution”), is merely an ordered sequence of instructions that tell the computer what to do. In most of my articles on Ars and in my book, I ...

Instruction Level Parallelism means executing multiple instructions or pieces of instructions at the same time to make the computer run faster. Computers have hit the parallelism wall. This paper will ...

The registers inside the CPU, the machine code instruction set, and the ways in which the instructions interact with the registers and status flags are all intertwined. As you may recall, one of my ...

There’s always some debate around what style of architecture is best for certain computing applications, with some on the RISC side citing performance per watt and some on the CISC side citing ...

The Android operating system is built to run on three different types of processor architecture: Arm, Intel x86, and MIPS. The former is today’s ubiquitous architecture after Intel abandoned its ...

The processor we will be considering in this tutorial is the MIPS processor. The MIPS processor, designed in 1984 by researchers at Stanford University, is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) ...

The processors in today’s computers have grown tremendously in performance, capabilities and complexity over the past decade. Clock speed has skyrocketed, and size has dwindled, even as the number of ...

Modern smartphones are essentially miniaturized computers with various processing components. You likely already know about the Central Processing Unit (CPU) from computers, but between the Graphics ...

Security vulnerabilities are always tricky to explain. People are supposed to be scared of them, because their data could be compromised, but the very nature of security problems means they involve ...