A helpful nugget of information from the exam cram 2 book.

cullbot

"A CPU is not a nuclear reactor, and should never be confused with one"

bighornsheep

that's right!

It's not THAT complicated.....remember the standard rule of I/O in computing; junk goes in, junk comes out!

TheShadow

I am still amused when people are shocked that a basic Intel architecture CPU can only add, subtract, multiply and divide. "Where are all those fancy math instructions in Excel coming from; my pocket calculator can do more than that .... etc etc etc." I used to break into what an ALU really was but gave that up long ago.

Danman32

TheShadow wrote:

I am still amused when people are shocked that a basic Intel architecture CPU can only add, subtract, multiply and divide. "Where are all those fancy math instructions in Excel coming from; my pocket calculator can do more than that .... etc etc etc." I used to break into what an ALU really was but gave that up long ago.

Yup, they don't realize that autonomous complex math functions are broken down to iterated simple math functions.
Even calculus calculations breaks down to the area under a curve by taking a sliver of a section at a time, calculating the aproximated area of that sliver using a trapazoid, then adding up the areas of all the slivers.