Oh, wow, oh, oh, whoa, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 94, How Computers Work, Part 4, Processor Architecture and Machine Code.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this fourth part of our series on how computers work, we're going to focus on the real nuts and bolts of how the actual processor itself performs instructions that carry out the programs that the computer is running.

So we'll start by talking about von Neumann architecture, which is the basic arrangement of,

and design of how modern computers work.

And then I'll go through the details about process architecture. So these, this

involves the main logic components that are part of the CPU, the central processing

unit and how they work together to actually carry out the instructions that are

part of the program that the processor is executing. I'll then talk about the

instruction set architecture which is the set of basic instructions that all programs are formed out of,

and the purpose of the CPU being to carry out the programs that are written in instructions taken from the instruction set architecture. So I recommend a pre-listing for this is obviously the previous episode

on logic gates and components.

So let's make a start in looking at the von Neumann architecture.

So the von Neumann architecture is also known as the Princeton architecture,

and it's a computer architecture, essentially the design of a computer,

that was described originally in 1945 by mathematician and physicist John von Neumann.

The basic components of the von Neumann architecture are the central processing unit, or the CPU,

which contains two key elements, a control unit and an ALU or an arithmetic logical unit.

The control unit essentially tells the other components of the processor what to do

and ensures they actually carry out those functions, and we'll look at how that happens in a moment.

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