Quick facts
- Function
- Instruction execution & arithmetic logic
- Architectures
- x86-64, ARM, RISC-V
- Execution Cycle
- Fetch, Decode, Execute, Write-back
- Leading Designers
- Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, ARM
Overview
The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the primary computational engine of general-purpose computers, responsible for fetching instructions from system memory, decoding them into micro-operations, and executing arithmetic and logic operations at nanosecond clock cycles.
Modern CPUs employ multi-core topologies, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, and multi-level SRAM caches (L1, L2, L3) to maximize instruction throughput and mitigate memory latency bottlenecks.