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Can anyone recommend a good article or video (preferably video) that gets into how CPUs work at a somewhat fundamental level? Ideally geared towards someone who

Can anyone recommend a good article or video (preferably video) that gets into how CPUs work at a somewhat fundamental level? Ideally geared towards someone who's generally familiar with computing concepts and not a total layman.

hinkley 8y ago
Might want to look at some books used for entry level computer engineering classes? Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson used to be a standard, if not the standard. The 4th edition is 7 years old now, but if an article about the 8087 caught your eye...
jamesmcm 8y ago
The Nand2Tetris course covers the fundamentals of the Von Neumann architecture using an ALU (though programs are read from ROM). Modern chips are obviously far more complicated than that though.
Koshkin 8y ago
http://visual6502.org/ http://visual6502.org/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+cpu+works https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+cpu+works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit#Structure_and_implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit#Struct...
ghaff 8y ago
I haven't personally gotten around to taking it, but there's a Computer Architecture MOOC from MIT on edX. https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-2-computer-mitx-6-004-2x https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-2-computer...
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  So that's part two of the 6.004 course. I'd highly recommend part one also, at least lectures 3 onward. The course starts with making analog transistors and tweaking them into handling digital data. Then making gates and combining them into state machines and ALUs and slowly putting together the pieces of a full CPU. The last third is adding caches, pipelining, virtual memory, multiprocessing, etc. It's useful too.
fernly 8y ago
Ben Eater's "Building an 8-bit computer" is a treat. He constructs a minimal computer from simple chips on breadboards, explaining everything. https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc/playlists
userbinator 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_Computer_Hardware_and_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_C...
deleted 8y ago
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hinkley 8y ago

Might want to look at some books used for entry level computer engineering classes? Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson used to be a standard, if not the standard. The 4th edition is 7 years old now, but if an article about the 8087 caught your eye...

jamesmcm 8y ago

The Nand2Tetris course covers the fundamentals of the Von Neumann architecture using an ALU (though programs are read from ROM). Modern chips are obviously far more complicated than that though.

Koshkin 8y ago

http://visual6502.org/ http://visual6502.org/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+cpu+works https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+cpu+works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit#Structure_and_implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit#Struct...

ghaff 8y ago

I haven't personally gotten around to taking it, but there's a Computer Architecture MOOC from MIT on edX. https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-2-computer-mitx-6-004-2x https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-2-computer...

Dylan16807 8y ago
So that's part two of the 6.004 course. I'd highly recommend part one also, at least lectures 3 onward. The course starts with making analog transistors and tweaking them into handling digital data. Then making gates and combining them into state machines and ALUs and slowly putting together the pieces of a full CPU. The last third is adding caches, pipelining, virtual memory, multiprocessing, etc. It's useful too.

fernly 8y ago

Ben Eater's "Building an 8-bit computer" is a treat. He constructs a minimal computer from simple chips on breadboards, explaining everything. https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc/playlists

userbinator 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_Computer_Hardware_and_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_C...

deleted 8y ago

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