How does a CPU work?

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3 points·buba··2 comments

This explains some digital logic but does not actually explain how a CPU works.

It does not explain an XOR gate, but references them. It also does not explain flip-flops, but references them also.

There should probably be an explanation of state machines since they are usually used to control the cycles in a CPU.

The title is actually "How does a CPU works?" but other than these few things it was a good article.

I know that text messages seem more harsh than intended and do not wish to seem demeaning, but helpful.

I bought a book called "Thinking Machines" by Irving Adler in 1962 which explained the concepts in this article (except for the 74181 ALU) and the XOR and flip-flops but did not understand how a computer actually worked until many years later.

I totally agree with you, but as you know, a CPU is pretty complex and is not possible to explain it all in just one article. Before writing it i've been looking for something similar and have not found any other article that explains as much as i've covered, so, to me it can be considered far from being perfect but "good enough".

Also, i'm technical but don't want to spoon-feed anyone, the article says what a logic gate is, how are they built and which ones are the basic ones, after that, just some wikipedia and google will be enough to teach any reader how to build the other variations, same applies to flip-flops.

I'm not witting this as rude as it looks, indeed, i agree that i've been far from explaining exactly how everything works and fit together, but i tried my best to make it simple, not too techie and easy to read, and becoming a text-book was just out of my scope.

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