Computers as Components, 3rd Edition

3.1 Introduction

This chapter describes aspects of CPUs that do not directly relate to their instruction sets. We consider a number of mechanisms that are important to interfacing to other system elements, such as interrupts and memory management. We also take a first look at aspects of the CPU other than functionality—performance and power consumption are both very important attributes of programs that are only indirectly related to the instructions they use.

In Section 3.2, we study input and output mechanisms including both busy/wait and interrupts. Section 3.3 introduces several specialized mechanisms for operations like detecting internal errors and protecting CPU resources. Section 3.4 introduces co-processors that provide optional support ...