How do CPUs Work? Exploring the 💻🧬 DNA of the Digital World
Go to http://brilliant.org/BranchEducation/ to try out all the courses Brilliant has to offer and expand your knowledge today! Use this link to get a 20% discount on their annual membership.Have you ever wondered how CPUs work? Well, in this video, we take a 3D animated tour of a Central Processing Unit and see exactly how it works. Central Processing Units, or CPUs, are incredibly complicated, and they practically run the modern world. CPUs can be found in every desktop computer, laptop, video game console, smartphone, and any other device you use on a daily basis. CPUs are built from tens of billions of transistors assembled into billions of logic gates, and essentially they're amazingly powerful calculators. But in reality, they're more like instruction-crunching and data-moving machines. All CPUs share a common DNA, which is the Fetch-Decode-Execute cycle. This cycle is both very powerful and a critical limitation of every CPU. So dive right in and we'll show you how CPUs work.
Table of Contents for How CPUs Work
00:00 - The CPU Inside Your Computer
01:45 - The Technological DNA of CPUs
03:28 - Teardown of a Laptop
04:39 - A CPU Die
05:59 - Analogy of a CPU
07:10 - Explaining the CPU Analogy
09:47 - How do CPUs Complete Instructions?
12:34 - The Program Counter
13:33 - Loops and Branches
16:01 - All Possible Instructions
17:07 - Fetch Decode Execute
21:14 - CPU Clock and Fetch Decode Execute
22:53 - Uncovering the Technological DNA: Fetch Decode Execute
23:47 - ASICs and FPGAs
24:35 - Memory and Writeback
25:36 - Sponsored Section
28:02 - RISC vs CISC
30:09 - About Branch Education
31:09 - Extrapolating to the M1
33:36 - The Diagram of a Performance Core
34:09 - CPU vs SoC
34:58 - GPU Architecture
35:55 - Thank You to Our Supporters
We're working on more ambitious subjects like How AI Works
Any contribution would greatly help make these videos. https://www.patreon.com/brancheducation
Branch Education Website: https://www.branch.education
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Animation Director: Mike Radjabov
Primary Animators: Muazzam Azizova, Max Botirov
Secondary Animators: Parvesh Khatri, Sherdil Davronov
Research, Script and Editing: Teddy Tablante
Twitter: @teddytablante
Modeling: Prakash Kakadiya
Image and Thumbnail Editing: Randy Catequista, BJ Torrejos, Adam Silven
Voice Over: Phil Lee
Sound Design by Drilu: www.drilu.studio
Sound Design and Mix: Luis Huesca
Erratum:
4004 (dot) com. "Intel 4004 - 50th Anniversary Project
Apple Newsroom. "Apple Unleashes M1" Nov10, 2020
ARM Information Center. "ARMv8 Architecture Reference Manual"
Compiler-explorer (dot) com. "Compiler Explorer"
Ken Shirriff's blog. "The 6502 microprocecssor chip"
Visual6502 (dot) org. "Visual Transistor-levl Simulation of the 6502 CPU"
Wikipedia contributors. "Control Unit", "CPU", "Instruction Register", "Integrated Circuit", "Memory Address Register", "Program Counter". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Visited November 11th 2025
WikiChip. "Cortex A77 Microarchitecture"
#CPU #CompSci #HowItWorks Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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