5WHAT VON NEUMANN KNEW: COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
The term computer architecture may refer to the entire hardware level of the computer. However, it is often used to refer to the design and implementation of the digital processor part of the computer hardware, and we focus on the computer processor architecture in this chapter.
The central processing unit (CPU, or processor) is the part of the computer that executes program instructions on program data. Program instructions and data are stored in the computer’s random access memory (RAM). A particular digital processor implements a specific instruction set architecture (ISA), which defines the set ...
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