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LESSON 5

PRINCIPLES OF WORK AND PROCESSOR
ARCHITECTURE

PART 1

Task 1. Learn the following words and word combinations:
Roughly, fingernail, implement, dwarf, appliances, handheld game,
envision, a sequence, compile, compatible at the ISA level.

Task 2. Make up your own sentences using words and phrases
from the previous exercise.

TEXT 1
PRINCIPLES OF WORK OF PROCESSORS
Modern microprocessors are among the most complex systems
ever created by humans. A single silicon chip, roughly the size of a
fingernail, can contain a complete high-performance processor, large
cache memories, and the logic required to interface it to external
devices. In terms of performance, the processors implemented on a
single chip today dwarf the room-sized supercomputers that cost over
$10 million just 20 years ago. Even the embedded processors found
in everyday appliances such as cell phones, personal digital
assistants, and handheld game systems are far more powerful than
the early developers of computers ever envisioned.
A processor must execute a sequence of instructions, where
each instruction performs some primitive operation, such as adding
two numbers. An instruction is encoded in binary form as a sequence
of 1 or more bytes. The instructions supported by a particular
processor and their byte-level encodings are known as its instruction-
set architecture (ISA). Different “families” of processors, such as
Intel IA32, IBM/Freescale PowerPC, and the ARM processor family
have different ISAs. A program compiled for one type of machine

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