Chapter Five Flashcards
what’s the process of the fetch execute cycle
a computer process that locates a program instruction from memory, decodes the instruction and carries out the required action this process is repeated for the rest of the program instructions
what does the control unit do
it decides which instruction to carry out first, it fetches it from the memory, decodes the instruction and executes it then repeats the process.
what does the arithmetic logic unit do
it carries out the arithmetic calculations and preforms logical comparisons to assist with decision making using AND, OR and NOT operators
what does pc stand for and what does it do
the program computer stores the addressor the next instruction to be executed
what does the mar mean and do
the memory address register. the address of the current instruction or data being executed is temporarily stored in the MAR.
What does the MDR mean and do
the memory data register. this register will temporarily store data being fetched from or written to the CPU.
what does the IR stand for and mean
the instruction register temporarily stores the current instruction to be decoded and then executed
what does the accumulator do
When calculations takes place on data, the results are initially stored in the accumulator before being transferred and stored in main memory.
what are the influences of the speed of processing
clock speed, cache and processor core
what does the clock speed do
this measures the number of instruction cycles the CPU can deal with in a second. its measured in GHZ (higher number the better)
what does the cache do
it temporarily stores frequent used instructions and data. it is quicker to search cache memory than RAM this then increases the processor speed.
what does the processor core do
this can be defined as a single processor. the more advanced CPUs contain more than one which will increase their ability to run many programs at the same time
