Everyone knows a CPU is the brain of a computer, but is that it? How does it work? How does it know how to execute x+= 12 ? *Let’s go deep inside of her and feel the warmth of her body and discover it 🙂 (My obsession with machines is concerning at this point 😄)

that’s our beauty for today, we will explore her

that’s our beauty for today, we will explore her

1. Basic knowledge

We are talking about hardware, so let’s first clear the air. Right now, Apple, AMD, Intel, Qualcom companies are dominant in the market. And they’re:

Company Chip family Type CPU architecture Typical use
Apple M-series SoC ARM64 Macs/iPads
A-series SoC ARM64 iPhones/iPads
AMD Ryzen CPU / APU x86-64 PCs/laptops
EPYC CPU x86-64 Servers
Radeon GPU AMD GPU ISA Gaming/graphics
Instinct GPU/AI accelerator CDNA AI/HPC
Intel Core / Core Ultra CPU / SoC x86-64 PCs/laptops
Xeon CPU x86-64 Servers
Arc GPU Xe architecture Graphics/AI
Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC ARM64 Phones/laptops/XR

NOTE: Don’t worry about them. I added them only to categorize things. None of them need to be known — they’re just for information.

Today we explore Intel’s x86_64 CPUs - because it is the most used one in the marketplace

BTW, what does x86_64 even mean?

History time: initially Intel released the 16-bit 8086 chip, then later the 32-bit 80386 chip, and eventually AMD extended the x86 family to 64-bit with AMD64. As you can see, many early chips in this family ended with …86, which is where the name x86 comes from. So when they say x86_64 - it simply means the 64-bit version of the x86 architecture. It is also backward compatible with older x86 instructions. That’s it nothing scary or complex

2. Hardware explanation

Let’s say the CPU is the father in our computer. But it has so many responsibilities to do, so it needs additional helpers. CPU’s two main components are ALU and Registers “calculator” and “extremely fast memory”, respectively

Registers

So, our father (CPU) can do many things but to keep everything “in mind” is hard, as a human we also forget if we try to keep multiple stuff in our brain at the same time, so CPU needs really really fast memory - registers

History time: in the old x86 family, there were something like these:

  1. AX = Accumulator
  2. BX = Base
  3. CX = Count
  4. DX = Data

Don’t be afraid of the name; we all know that programmers aren’t good at naming. And if you look closely, their first letter is the name of their old job.