we've gotten used to throwing around the term CPU core the part of your processor
that does the actual you know processing we understand that
more cores are usually better especially for applications like video editing but
what exactly makes a core different from the rest of the CPU and how exactly do
they work it's probably useful to first define what a core is not
cores don't handle io or input output from the rest of the system as there's a
separate part of the CPU die that deals with that nor do they provide you with
the graphics that is the responsibility of an integrated GPU which also sits on
a different part of the die so now let's look at what a core does do by talking
about the different parts of a core let's start out with the alu or
arithmetic logic unit the alu does exactly what it sounds like it's the
part of your computer that does the thinking more specifically it handles
mathematical operations and also carries out logical operations such as comparing
different values although this might make the alu sound like a fancy
calculator the programming languages that enable everything you do on your
computer rely on math and formal logic that the alu can understand cores often
also have a floating point unit which is similar to an alu but deals with number
sets that have their decimal points in different places and you can learn more
about what this means and why it's important in this video right up here
but how do the alu and the fpu know what to work on well data is fed to
these units by registers these are temporary holding places for whatever
the CPU core has to process next one type of register called an input
register holds the data that the CPU needs to process while another type of
register called an instruction register tells the CPU what to do with that data
so if the system needs to multiply six and three it will place six and three
into the input registers and a multiply instruction into the instruction
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description and check out secret lab today the alu will then figure out the
product 18 in this case and send the result to yet another part of the core
called an accumulator the accumulator then sends the result to
the cash which is a small amount of extremely fast memory built into each
core this data can then be read by the program that requests it and by the way
the cache sends data the other direction as well specifically it holds the data
and the instruction the CPU has to process and execute before that data
enters the alu now at the beginning of all this the data is initially fetched
from your main system RAM but having it in the cache before the cores need to
process it makes your pc run much faster
once the CPU core finishes working on one instruction it of course has to move
on to the next one so another part of the core is called the instruction
pointer it contains the location in memory where the CPU should load the
next instruction from but what ties all of it together
to find the answer out we actually have to go outside the cores themselves the
CPU features a memory management unit or mmu that's separate from the cores that
directs the data that flows between RAM and the CPU cores kind of like a traffic
cop and the CPU die also has a control unit that manages the cores by
synchronizing their different parts so that they work together fluidly to do so
the control unit uses a clock signal that runs at a specific clock rate that
same number you see on your CPU or computer's label given in gigahertz or
billions of clock cycles per second fast enough to help you watch this video
so hopefully now you understand the difference between a CPU core and the
other parts of your processor and we know this is a very simplified high
level overview of a very complicated
device like a CPU we don't exactly have time to get into a whole phd
dissertation here on techwiki but maybe you'll find one of those down
in the comments so thanks for watching guys if you like this video hit like hit
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