What is a CPU Architecture?
You may have heard the term CPU Architecture, or Computer architecture, but what does it actually mean? Let's find out! There are three main things that these terms usually refer to, two of which are much more common than the last. Commercial Performance-Improvement Architecture The first, and probably most common meaning is the design of a particular release of CPUs from a major company, (for example Zen, Zen+, Skylake, or Alder Lake to name a few). Newer kinds of these architectures generally offer superior performance, or lower power consumption, but fundamentally they use the same design ideas. They might have slightly more ALUs, or a slightly larger cache, better branch prediction, more I/O support, etc, but they are fundamentally the same. There are large differences between different architectures from different companies like AMD and Intel, but they actually have a lot in common as we're about to see: CPU Use-Case-Adaptation Design An alternative meaning is the more