Cache prefetching is what allows processors to have data and/or instructions ready for use in a fast local cache rather than having to wait for a fetch request to trickle through to system RAM and ...

There was a time when owning a computer meant you probably knew most or all of the instructions it could execute. Your modern PC, though, has a lot of instructions, many of them meant for specialized ...

Even though a microprocessor can operate at a clock frequency of 3GHz and the FPGA chips operate in the 100–300MHz frequency range, the parallelism and internal bandwidth on a DEL processor can ...

A team based at STMicroelectronics' (ST) central R&D lab in Agrate, Italy, has built a processor with a dynamically programmable instruction set. The work will be presented at the Custom Integrated ...

Cortus released the APS23 and APS25 32-bit processor IP cores, based on v2 of the company’s instruction set. The new instruction set aims to reduce the size of a system’s instruction memory, usually ...

We all think of the CPU as the "brains" of a computer, but what does that actually mean? What is going on inside with the billions of transistors that make your computer work? In this four-part series ...

Every modern computer has a microprocessor in it, but not many have a digital signal processor (DSP). Since the CPU is a digital device, it clearly processes digital data, so you might wonder what the ...