Programmer's Model of a Processor Executing Instructions Versus Reality
Everything on a computer system eventually ends up being run as a sequence of machine instructions. People want to keep things simple and understandable even if that is not really the way that things work. The simple programmer's model of a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processor executing those machine language instruction is a loop of the following steps each step finished before moving on the the next step: Fetch instruction Decode instruction and fetch register operands Execute arithmetic computation...