CSC258H1 Lecture Notes - Datapath, Opcode, Louisiana Baptist University
Document Summary
Control unit the control thing : processor datapath. Datapath description/illustration of how the data flows between processor components during the execution of an operation: data bus (bus) group of wires through which the communication btween components takes place. Multiple components can read from a bus. Only one can write to a bus at a time; aka bus driver. Each component has a tristate buffer that feeds into the bus. When not reading or writing, the tristate buffer drives high impedance onto the bus: datapath example. The simplified datapath for most processor operation has stages as shown in the diagram. In order to know what operation to perform, there is a section of memory that stores instructions for the processor to execut. For this course, we assume that the instructions; data and stack are all stored in main memory. The program counter (pc) register stores the address of the instruction currently being ran; starts from 0.