There was a time when owning a computer meant you probably knew most or all of the instructions it could execute. Your modern PC, though, has a lot of instructions, many of them meant for specialized ...

A team based at STMicroelectronics' (ST) central R&D lab in Agrate, Italy, has built a processor with a dynamically programmable instruction set. The work will be presented at the Custom Integrated ...

Even though a microprocessor can operate at a clock frequency of 3GHz and the FPGA chips operate in the 100–300MHz frequency range, the parallelism and internal bandwidth on a DEL processor can ...

We all think of the CPU as the "brains" of a computer, but what does that actually mean? What is going on inside with the billions of transistors that make your computer work? In this four-part series ...

When asked about how a central processing unit works, you might say it’s the brain of the computer. It does all the calculations on math and makes logical decisions based on certain outcomes. However, ...

Cache prefetching is what allows processors to have data and/or instructions ready for use in a fast local cache rather than having to wait for a fetch request to trickle through to system RAM and ...

Cortus released the APS23 and APS25 32-bit processor IP cores, based on v2 of the company’s instruction set. The new instruction set aims to reduce the size of a system’s instruction memory, usually ...