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 ...

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 ...

You might call it the brains of the operation.

A computer instruction is an order given to a computer processor by a computer program. At the lowest level, each instruction is a sequence of 0s and 1s that describes a physical operation the ...

I've been writing on CPU technology here at Ars for almost five years now, and during that time I've done my best to communicate computing concepts in as plain and accessible a manner as possible ...

Both Intel and AMD CPUs pretend to be an Intel 8086 when they boot up, and Intel gave up on getting rid of it.

Microprocessor units (MPUs) are silicon devices that serve as the central processing unit (CPU) in computers. They contain thousands of electronic components and machine instructions to perform ...

Forty years ago today, electronics and semiconductor trade newspaper Electronic News ran an advertisement for a new kind of chip. The Intel 4004, a $60 chip in a 16-pin dual in-line package, was an ...