For questions relating to CPU - central processing unit
Questions tagged [cpu]
121 questions
28
votes
8 answers
Why was desktop CPU frequency so low in the late 1990s?
I think even in the 1990s it wouldn't have been a problem to build a 4GHz clock generator.
Increase a transistor here and a resistor there and the clock rate will go up.
(I know there was DECT in the early 1990s and it had a frequency of 1900MHz in…
zomega
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19
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1 answer
What are the screws for on the UltraSPARC?
I fail to grasp what can be screwed on them, can you explain what are these for?
Eric Cartman
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12
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2 answers
How did the CP1600 CPU supposedly make looping faster?
I came across an Intellivision in a box of stuff. When I looked it up on Wikipedia, it said that it uses a CP1600 that is based off a PDP-11. There's a weird entry on the wiki page:
CP1600 did not support memory-memory indirect addressing…
b degnan
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6
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2 answers
8 registers in the 9440?
Looking over the 9440 spec sheet, a question arises. The very first line notes that it has eight registers... eight? There's the four AC's, PC, carry bit (all 16-bits for that one!) and... what? On the NOVA3 you would have SP and SO, but this didn't…
Maury Markowitz
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-5
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2 answers
What are common instructions used to put the CPU into idle mode in the past?
I once did some tutorials on osdev.org and one interesting point was how the CPU is set into idle mode.
Because when no task has work to do you want to put the CPU into idle mode and not consume any current.
On x86 it is done like this:
JMP .
You…
zomega
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