01:198:170 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Program Counter, Control Unit, Parallelogram

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Computer Science
• Course: 01:198:170
• Professor: Stephen Stoll

Document Summary

Computer clock: how fast your computer can perform the fetch/execute cycle: how many cycles it can do in 1 second. Program counter: tracks instruction that"s going to be executed next. Branch/jump instruction: allows you to change the sequence of instructions (skip, repeat, go to another set of instructions, etc. ) changes ow of program from top to bottom. Pipelining: when rst part of cpu fetches instructions, it doesn"t wait for other 4 steps to nish goes right back to program counter to fetch the next instruction after it. Control unit: the brains /conductor of the computer (makes sure that everything needs to be where the computer needs when the fetch/execute cycle happens) Alu: arithmetic logic unit (does the math; performs 20 different instructions: there are circuits that can only add, multiply, subtract, etc. A program is a specialized algorithm (set of instructions followed to solve a speci c problem)