CPU Structure and Function A-Level

What is the purpose of the CPU?

Which stage of the CPU processing cycle is being described here: “instructions are carried out on the data”?

How does the CPU work?

When you open a program, where is its data and instructions loaded?

What is the name of the components which connect the CPU to the RAM, allowing instructions, data and addresses to be transported?

Where are data and instructions taken from during a CPU processing cycle?

Tick the examples of processing data.

What are the three main areas of the CPU?

What are the three main stages of the CPU processing cycle?

Which stage of the CPU processing cycle is being described here: “the CPU makes sense of the instructions”?

What is special about the Von Neumann Architecture?

In assembly language, what does the mnemonic “ADD” mean?

What is an instruction set?

What is a ‘register’ when discussing CPU’s?

Which register is responsible for keeping count of the Fetch-Decode-Execute cycles?

Which register is responsible for storing the ‘address’ of the next instruction required by the CPU?

Which register is responsible for initially storing the next instruction/item of data required by the CPU?

Which register is responsible for storing intermediate result from each calculation, at the end of each Fetch-Decode-Execute cycle?

In assembly language, what does the mnemonic “LDA” mean?

In assembly language, what does the mnemonic “STA” mean?

What is meant by the term ‘clock speed’ when discussing the CPU?

A CPU with a speed of 3 MHz means that it can perform how many F-D-E cycles per second?

What is ‘overclocking’?

What is a disadvantage of overclocking?

What is cache memory?

What is the advantage of cache memory?

What is a CPU core?

Will a dual core processor always provide improved performance over a single core processor?

What is an embedded system?

From the list below, tick the characteristics that will effect the performance of a CPU.