We recently looked at the origins of the integrated circuit (IC) and the calculator, which was the IC’s first killer app, but a surprise twist is that the calculator played a big part in the invention ...

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 ...

In my previous article, Understanding the Microprocessor, I gave a high-level overview of what a microprocessor is and how it functions. I talked about the kinds of tasks it performs and the different ...

What are the differences between Microcontroller and Microprocessor in both hardware and applications? Microcontroller and Processor are often times confused with each other, but they are different in ...

ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) is the fundamental unit of a microprocessor which performs all the basic operations based on the control input selection. There are separate units which work independent of ...

The term "Bit Slicing" was once dominant in history books as a technique for constructing a processor from processor modules of smaller bit width where each of these components processes one field or ...

In the 1970s CPUs still had wildly different approaches to basic features, with the Intel 8086 being one of them. Whereas the 6502 used separate circuits for operations, and the Intel 8085 a clump of ...