Design of Processors

Central processor unit (CPU) is considered as the pearl on the crown of IC industry. It is an important driving force of Moore’s law in the past decades. This chapter starts with the introduction of some basic concept of the processor, e.g., instruction set architecture (ISA), data path, control logic, coprocessor, pipeline, multi-issue, single instruction multiple data, multithread, multicore, manycore, memory architecture. It also introduces several common types of processor, e.g., digital signal processor (DSP) and graphics processor unit (GPU).