How Does a Microprocessor Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews and today I'm going to show you how a Microprocessor works. I've a diagram on my PC that I'm going to pull up here. This is a simple diagram of a Microprocessor. Now this box right here is going to be the Microprocessor and these two boxes down here are separate from the processor. If you have heard anybody refer to RAM or memory, that's what these two box here is going to refer to, it's going to represent. And RAM and memory is basically the space that your computer uses to do its calculations. And it more or less holds a whole lot of numbers that the computer would do its operations on. RAM is a built-in memory. It does not change and that will be sort like your Motherboard's programming and that tells the processor how it should handle commands. Now, inside of our processor we have basically three separated units. We have a control unit, which is what loads in the commands from the RAM or the RAM and sends them off to be processed. We have registers. Now registers are small areas inside of the processor that store single values. And inside of those registers is what, is what the processor uses to do its calculations; like it will load a one into one register and a two into another register, run an addition command on those two and you get an output of three that's stored in another register. So basically that's how it does its processing. Now the ALU is probably one of the more, more complicated parts of the processor. It is what actually does the Math inside the processor. It is hardwired to take two numbers and add them together or subtract which will actually be adding a negative, that's how it does that. It can do multiplication by looping through addition and division by looping through subtraction and it is what basically takes all of your numbers and does all the operations. And it communicates back with these registers which sends in the responses back to RAM and the rest of your computer operates on what's in the memory. So that's how a Microprocessor works. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how a Microprocessor works."