CPU's internal bus system.
Required to transmit signals between circuits in the CPU.
Two sub-categories
Control bus - used to maintain the CPU
Clock for synchronization.
Interrupt transmission.
Other overhead signals.
Datapath - connects the circuits needed to transfer and manipulate
data specified by a task command.
Datapath
Consists of
Arithmetic logic unit (ALU)
Control register
Data transfer registers
Data storage
Addressing
Synchronous timing and fetch execute (von Neumann) cycle.
Fetch/execute cycle
Clock used to ensure that circuits a stable state between each step of
the fetch execute cycle.
Single path data-path - Basic von Neumann design
von Neumann bottleneck - limit to 1 CPU sub-task at a time.
Multi-path - Pipe-lining and Super-scalar.
Simple pipe-ling
Multiple instructions in CPU
Different steps of the F/E cycle being processed on different instructions.
Parallel pipeline
Duplicate circuits in CPU allow CPU to process 2 instructions at once.
Certain overhead circuits not duplicated.
Super-scalar
Because certain circuits function much more quickly than others,
only the slower circuits paralleled.
Often not true parallel.
Rather one integer and one floating point ALUs
Less competition for same resources.