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Consequently, all early computers had a serial ALU that operated on one data bit at a time although they often presented a wider word size to programmers. The first computer to have multiple parallel discrete single-bit ALU circuits was the 1951 Whirlwind I, which employed sixteen such "math units" to enable it to operate on 16-bit words.
It provides many of the functions found in simple, commercially available CPUs. The most complex element of the CPU is the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) which provides the computational functionality of the computer. The ALU is a combinational logic device having two 16-bit input operands and a single 16-bit output.
Support for such operations was an upgrade option rather than being a standard feature. Since the VAX's registers were 32 bits wide, a 128-bit operation used four consecutive registers or four longwords in memory. The ICL 2900 Series provided a 128-bit accumulator, and its instruction set included 128-bit floating-point and packed decimal ...
A collection of computers and other devices connected by communications channels, e.g. by Ethernet or wireless networking. network interface controller. Also LAN card or network card. [6] network on a chip (NOC) A computer network on a single semiconductor chip, connecting processing elements, fixed-function hardware, or even memories and caches.
In computer processors, the carry flag (usually indicated as the C flag) is a single bit in a system status register/flag register used to indicate when an arithmetic carry or borrow has been generated out of the most significant arithmetic logic unit (ALU) bit position.
Laptop computer using an Efficeon processor CPUs feature SIMD instruction sets ( Advanced Vector Extensions and the FMA instruction set etc.) where 256-bit vector registers are used to store several smaller numbers, such as eight 32-bit floating-point numbers, and a single instruction can operate on all these values in parallel.
The configuration of a computer is typically recorded in a configuration file. In modern computer systems, this is created and updated automatically as physical components are added or removed. Applications may assume that the configuration file is an accurate representation of the physical configuration and act accordingly.
Some architectures such as PowerPC attempt to avoid the need for cacheline locking or scratchpads through the use of cache control instructions.Marking an area of memory with "Data Cache Block: Zero" (allocating a line but setting its contents to zero instead of loading from main memory) and discarding it after use ('Data Cache Block: Invalidate', signaling that main memory didn't receive any ...