INTRODUCTION Many people consider the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to be the brains of the computer.

This analogy is very loose because, for the most part, the CPU cannot keep data stored inside it like a brain. In contrast, it is used to process much of the information needed by the computer, just like our brain thinks and processes information and gives orders to our other body parts. Two components handle processing in a computer: the central processing unit and the memory. Both are located on the computer`s main system board, or motherboard. The CPU is where data are manipulated. In a microcomputer, the entire CPU is contained on a tiny chip called a microprocessor, which is no larger than your smallest fingernail. The chip is mounted on a piece of plastic with metal leads attached to it. On large machines, CPUs require one or more printed circuit boards. On personal computers and small workstations, the CPU is housed in a single chip called a microprocessor. Since the 1970's the microprocessor class of CPUs has almost completely overtaken all other CPU implementations. The CPU itself is an internal component of the computer. Modern CPUs are small and square and contain multiple metallic connectors or pins on the underside. The CPU is inserted directly into a CPU socket, pin side down, on the motherboard. Each motherboard will support only a specific type or range of CPU so you must check the motherboard manufacturer's specifications before attempting to replace or upgrade a CPU. Modern CPUs also have an attached heat sink and small fan that go directly on top of the CPU to help dissipate heat. Over years, CPU changes from the Intel`s first microprocessor unto the latest CPU`s used today. This paper will provide information on the history of CPU, its appearance, the materials

used to make a CPU, the parts and its functions, how the CPU operates, factors affecting its speed and performance, different companies making CPU and some frequently asked questions by the public using CPU.

OBJECTIVES This paper aims to: 1. Discuss the history of CPU. 2. Illustrate the appearance of a CPU and how it is being made. 3. Talk about the parts of CPU and its function. 4. Factors affecting the speed and performance of a CPU. 5. Comparison of CPU between different company producers.

History of CPU A brief history of the important CPUs which were featured in PCs over the years. Although it has been dominated by Intel, it can be seen that AMD coming out with some cuttingedge CPUs in the last few years.

Intel 4004 Intel's first microprocessor. It was a breakthrough in computer technology, (1971) powering one of the first electronic calculators. Intel 8008 This is the first chip that was used in a PC. It could run at 4 MHz and supported (1979) up to 1 MB of system RAM. The 186 was a very popular CPU. There are two versions, an 8-bit or 16-bit (the

Intel 80186 amount of bits allowed to be inputted each clock cycle). The 186 eventually (1980) reached a speed of 25 MHz, using 3 volts. This is a 16-bit processor which supports up to 16 MB of RAM. It was the first processor to be able to multitask (run multiple programs at a time), but the Intel 80286 operating systems at that time could not take advantage of it. The chip ran as high (1982) as 20 MHz. This was a revolutionary chip for the PC industry. It was the first 32-bit processor, which meant it could use twice as much data on each clock cycle. The Intel 80386 386 was also capable of using 16 bytes of cache. Having speeds from 12.5 MHz (1988) Intel (1991) Intel Pentium (1993) to 33 MHz, it was a big step for the PC, and was very user-friendly. The 486 used much of the 386 architecture, but it added a math coprocessor, 486 which made it much faster. It can go up to 120MHz. It also came in an SX version, which was cheaper to make because no math coprocessor was utilized. The Pentium was available in speeds from 75MHz all the way up to 233MHz. It had an FPU, which allowed much greater performance. Internally, it had two 32bit chips which split the work. The chip came with 16 KB of cache.

Intel

Built with over 7.5 million transistors, this processor included MMX technology,

Pentium II used to process video and audio faster. This CPU used a cartridge to connect to (1997) AMD Athlon (1999) Intel the motherboard. It had a built in L2 Cache, making it a very fast processor. The first processor that was faster than its Intel counterpart, the Athlon made history. It featured 256Kb of cache, as well as 3DNow instructions designed to improve the FPU. It uses a 266MHz bus, twice as fast as the Pentium III. AMD made history with the Athlon by being the first to break the 1GHz barrier.

Pentium III Performing similarly to the AMD Athlon, the Pentium III features 256Kb of (1999) Intel cache. It comes in speeds from 450MHz all the way up to 1.13 GHz. This chip is actually much slower than its predecessor, but the MHz advantage it has over the Pentium III made it faster. It is especially fast on internet

Pentium 4 applications, although it cannot compete with its AMD counterpart in any other (2001) AMD Thunderbir d (2001) area. Currently the best PC processor on the market, AMD dominates the world of 3D gaming as well as professional programs. It comes in first in almost every test, even though its clock is about 0.5GHz slower than the Pentium 4.

What Does a CPU Look Like? A CPU is a silicon integrated circuit, sometimes called a computer chip. This is because it consists of a square piece of crystallized silicon that is very, very thin. It has a very intricate pattern on top, which consists of the transistors and wires that have been processed into the silicon: a silicon chip contains millions of tiny transistors connected by very tiny wires. The chip is also connected to the rest of the computer with very tiny strands of wire.

Modern processors often have a heat sink added on top of the CPU: a heat sink is a set of metal fins that quickly dissipate the heat from the CPU into the surrounding air. The heat sink is necessary for some computer chips because they run so fast that the heat they generate can cause damage. Most heat sinks also have a small fan to improve the cooling: they are like a radiator for the CPU. How a CPU is made. CPU Came From Sand. Sand, which is made up of 25 percent silicon, is, after oxygen, the second most abundant chemical element that's in the earth's crust. Sand, especially quartz, has high percentages of silicon in the form of silicon dioxide (SiO2) and is the base ingredient for semiconductor manufacturing. After procuring raw sand and separating the silicon, the excess material is disposed of and the silicon is purified in multiple steps to finally reach semiconductor manufacturing quality which is called electronic grade silicon. The resulting purity is so great that electronic grade silicon may only have one alien atom for every one billion silicon atoms. After the purification process, the silicon enters the melting phase. One big crystal is grown from the purified silicon melt. The resulting mono-crystal is called an ingot. A mono-crystal ingot is produced from electronic grade silicon. One ingot weighs approximately 100 kilograms (or 220 pounds) and has a silicon purity of 99.9999 percent. The ingot is then moved onto the slicing phase where individual silicon discs, called wafers, are sliced thin. Some ingots can stand higher than five feet. Several different diameters of ingots exist depending on the required wafer size. Today, CPUs are commonly made on 300 mm wafers. Once cut, the wafers are polished until they have flawless, mirror-smooth surfaces. Intel doesn't produce its own ingots and wafers, and instead purchases manufacturing-ready wafers

from third-party companies. Intels advanced 45 nm High-K/Metal Gate process uses wafers with a diameter of 300 mm (or 12-inches). When Intel first began making chips, it printed circuits on 50 mm (2-inches) wafers. These days, Intel uses 300 mm wafers, resulting in decreased costs per chip. The blue liquid is a photo resist finish similar to those used in film for photography. The wafer spins during this step to allow an evenly-distributed coating that's smooth and also very thin. At this stage, the photo-resistant finish is exposed to ultra violet (UV) light. The chemical reaction triggered by the UV light is similar to what happens to film material in a camera the moment you press the shutter button. Areas of the resist on the wafer that have been exposed to UV light will become soluble. The exposure is done using masks that act like stencils. When used with UV light, masks create the various circuit patterns. The building of a CPU essentially repeats this process over and over until multiple layers are stacked on top of each other. A lens reduces the mask's image to a small focal point. The resulting "print" on the wafer is typically four times smaller, linearly, than the mask's pattern. After being exposed to UV light, the exposed blue photo resist areas are completely dissolved by a solvent. This reveals a pattern of photo resist made by the mask. The beginnings of transistors, interconnects, and other electrical contacts begin to grow from this point. After the etching, the photo resist is removed and the desired shape becomes visible. More photo resist is applied and then re-exposed to UV light. Exposed photo resist is then washed off again before the next step, which is called ion doping. This is the step where ion particles are exposed to the wafer, allowing the silicon to change its chemical properties in a way that allows the CPU to control the flow of electricity. Through a process called ion implantation

(one form of a process called doping) the exposed areas of the silicon wafer are bombarded with ions. Ions are implanted in the silicon wafer to alter the way silicon in these areas conduct electricity. Ions are propelled onto the surface of the wafer at very high velocities. An electrical field accelerates the ions to a speed of over 300,000 km/hour (roughly 185,000 mph) After the ion implantation, the photo resist will be removed and the material that should have been doped now has alien atoms implanted. The wafers are put into a copper sulphate solution at this stage. Copper ions are deposited onto the transistor through a process called electroplating. The copper ions travel from the positive terminal (anode) to the negative terminal (cathode) which is represented by the wafer. The copper ions settle as a thin layer on the wafer surface. The excess material is polished off leaving a very thin layer of copper. Multiple metal layers are created to interconnects (think wires) in between the various transistors. How these connections have to be wired is determined by the architecture and design teams that develop the functionality of the respective processor (for example, Intels Core i7 processor). While computer chips look extremely flat, they may actually have over 20 layers to form complex circuitry. If you look at a magnified view of a chip, you will see an intricate network of circuit lines and transistors that look like a futuristic, multi-layered highway system. The substrate, the die, and the heat spreader are put together to form a completed processor. The green substrate builds the electrical and mechanical interface for the processor to interact with the rest of the PC system. The silver heat spreader is a thermal interface where a cooling solution will be applied. This will keep the processor cool during operation. Parts of CPU and its functions

Every CPU has at least two basic parts, the control unit and the arithmetic logic unit. All the computer`s resources are managed from the control unit, whose function is to coordinate all the computer activities. It is a traffic cop, directing the flow of data around the CPU and around the computer. The control unit contains the CPU`s instructions for carrying out commands. The instruction set, which is built into the circuitry of the control unit, is a list of all operations that the CPU can perform. Each instruction in the instruction set is accompanied by microcode, very basic directions that tell the CPU how to execute the instruction. When the computer runs a program, it looks up the command contained in the program in the CPU`s instruction set and executes them in order. When the control unit encounters an instruction that involves arithmetic or logic, it passes control to the second component of the CPU, the ALU or arithmetic logic unit. The ALU includes a group of registers- memory locations built directly into the CPU that are used to hold data that are being processed by the current instruction. The ALU is the high-speed CPU circuit that does calculating and comparing. Numbers are transferred from memory into the ALU for calculation, and the results are sent back into memory. Alphanumeric data are sent from memory into the ALU for comparing. The Control unit and ALU also contain set of registers to enhance the computers performance. These are the registers. Registers are high speed staging areas that temporarily store data during processing and provide working areas for computation. These hold material that is to be processed immediately. Some registers are Instruction Decoder, a device which interprets the instruction to be executed. Programmer Counter (PC) which holds the address of next instruction to be executed. Instruction Register (IR) which holds the instruction being executed. Process Status Register which holds "processor bit" about operation done by ALU. Accumulator

(ACC) which stores intermediate and final results of calculation. Its the main working area of ALU. General Purpose Register which can be used to store any temporary information during execution of instruction. Memory Address Register (MAR) which holds address the data word to be accessed. Memory Data Register (MDR) which holds the data word when it is transferred to and from the main memory. Address Decoder which interprets the address in the MAR and selects the appropriate cell in the main memory to be accessed.

How does a CPU operates? A machine cycle is a series of operations performed to execute a program instruction. It consists of two parts: the instruction cycle and the execution cycle. The instruction cycle includes fetching and decoding. During the instruction cycle, the CPU fetches a command or data from main memory and decodes it, Determines what it means. The execution cycle includes the executing and storing. During the execution cycle, the CPU executes the instruction or performs the operation on the data, and may store the instruction's result in memory or register.

Processing Speeds There are three ways in which processing speeds are measured. 1) Time to complete one machine cycle in fractions of a second. 2) Time to complete instructions in millions of instructions per second. 3) Time in floating point operations per second. Factors Affecting Processing Speed

The circuitry design of a CPU determines its basic speed, but several additional factors can make chips already designed for speed work even faster. For example CPUs registers, the memory, the cache memory, data bus, and math coprocessor affect a computers speed. How registers affect speed The size of the registers is sometimes called the word size which indicates the amount of data with which the computer can work at any given time. The bigger the word size, the more quickly the computer can process a set of data. 32 bit processors, or 64 bit processors, or even 64 bit computers. are some examples of terminology which refers to the size of the register in the processor. Memory and computing power The amount of RAM in a computer can have a profound effect on the computers power. It means more RAM in computer can use bigger, more powerful programs, and those programs can access bigger data files. And more RAM also can make the computer run faster. It comes from the CPU can keep more of the active program and data in memory, rather than in storage. The bus The bus refers to the paths between the components of a computer. The data bus and the address bus are two main buses in a computer which are located on the motherboard. The data bus

It is an electrical path that connects the CPU, memory, and the other hardware devices on the motherboard. Indeed, the bus is a group of parallel wires. Besides, the number of wires in the bus affects the speed at which data can travel between hardware components. Each wire can transfer one bit at a time. If it is eight wire bus, it can move eight bits at a time or a full byte. Thus, the width of the data bus determines how many bits at a time can be transmitted between the CPU and other devices. The address bus The second bus that is found in every microcomputer is the address bus. It is a set of wires similar to the data bus that connects the CPU and RAM and carries the memory addresses. The reason of the address bus is important is that the number of wires in it determines the maximum number of memory addresses. For instance, if the address bus could carry only eight bits at a time, the CPU could address only 256 bytes of RAM (28 bytes). Cache Memory Cache memory is similar to RAM, except that it is extremely fast compared to normal memory, and it is used in a different way. It helps to reduce the time consuming operation of CPU which is moving data back and forth to RAM. It speeds up processing by storing frequently used data or instructions in its high speed memory. Whenever the CPU requests information from RAM, the cache controller intercepts the request and searches its own memory for the requested information. If the information is not here, the CPU retrieves the required data from the RAM memory and also sends a copy back to the cache. The next time the CPU needs the

same information, the cache finds that information, and quickly sends it to the CPU, leaving RAM out of the loop. Passing math operations to the math coprocessor A math coprocessor is a chip that is specially designed to handle complicated mathematical operations. Newer CPUs have math coprocessors built in. Math coprocessors support the extreme number of calculations involved in generating computer graphics and video imaging. It holds to be generalist. CPU`s used in Personal Computer Intel Processors Since 1978, Intel's processors have evolved from the 8086 and the 8088 to the 80286, 80386, and 80486, to the Pentium family of processors. All are part of the 80x 86 lines. Intel's Pentium family of processors includes the Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium with MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, and Xeon processors. The earliest Intel processors included only a few thousand transistors. Today's Pentium processors include 9.5 million transistors or more. AMD Processors Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was long known as a provider of lower-performance processors for use in low-cost computers. With its K6 line of processors, AMD challenged Intel's processors in terms of both price and performance. With the K6-III processor, AMD broke the 600 MHz barrier, claiming the "fastest processor" title for the first time in IBM-compatible computers. Cyrix Processors

Cyrix began as a specialty chip maker, but eventually began producing microprocessors. Cyrix processors are most commonly used in lowprice, low-end consumer PCs. Cyrix formerly produced the MediaGX processor, and now produces the MII series of processors. Motorola Processors Motorola makes the CPUs used in Macintosh and PowerPC computers. Macintosh processors use a different basic structural design (architecture) than IBM-compatible PC processors. With the release of the G3 and G4 PowerPC processors, Macintosh computers set new standards for price and performance. RISC Processors Most PCs are based on complex instruction set computing (CISC) chips which contain large instruction sets. Reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors use smaller instruction sets. This enables them to process more instructions per second than (CISC) chips. RISC processors are found in Apple's PowerPC systems, as well as many H/PCs, workstations, minicomputers, and mainframes. Parallel Processing In parallel processing, multiple processors are used in a single system, enabling them to share processing tasks. In a massively parallel processor (MPP) system, many processors are used. Some MPP systems utilize thousands of processors simultaneously.