The CPU can be considered the heart of the computing system. It includes two main components.
- Control Unit (CU) : Determines the order in which instructions should be executed and controls the retrieval of the proper operands.
- Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) : ALU performs the mathematical or logical operations.
Registers
- Registers are small storage elements that are located very close to the ALU.
- Registers are used as temporary storage during computation.
- ALU can read from and write to registers very fast.