Arithmetic unit
In microelectronics and technical informatics, an arithmetic unit or operational unit is a switching unit for executing the machine instructions of a computer program .
Explanation
The term is often used synonymously with arithmetic-logic unit (ALU), but strictly speaking, an ALU represents only one (of many) functional units of an arithmetic unit, which also consists of a number of auxiliary and status registers . In addition to the functional units, many arithmetic units also have jump prediction logic or out-of-order control. In addition, an arithmetic unit can also contain several ALUs. In addition to the register records , floating point arithmetic units consist of two ALUs for separate manipulation of the exponent and mantissa of a floating point number. The ALU itself, however, does not contain any register cells and thus represents a pure switching network. Modern high-performance computers have a large number of arithmetic units that work independently of one another and each specialize in the execution of certain commands.
Execution Unit
An execution unit combines several highly specialized arithmetic units on accelerator cards or graphics cards. For example, the graphics chip HD Graphics 630 has 24 execution units with a total of 192 shaders , i.e. 8 shaders per execution unit.
See also
Single receipts
- ↑ Processor architecture. In: Electronics Compendium. 2016
- ↑ arithmetic unit. In: IT knowledge. accessed on August 9, 2016.