Arithmetic logic unit - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Computing

Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...

, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a digital circuit

Digital circuit

Digital electronics represent signals by discrete bands of analog levels, rather than by a continuous range. All levels within a band represent the same signal state...

that performs arithmetic

Arithmetic

Arithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations. It involves the study of quantity, especially as the result of combining numbers...

and logical operations.
The ALU is a fundamental building block of the central processing unit

Central processing unit

The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...

of a computer, and even the simplest microprocessor

Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

s contain one for purposes such as maintaining timers. The processors found inside modern CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs

Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...

) accommodate very powerful and very complex ALUs; a single component may contain a number of ALUs.

Mathematician John von Neumann

John von Neumann

John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...

proposed the ALU concept in 1945, when he wrote a report on the foundations for a new computer called the EDVAC

EDVAC

EDVAC was one of the earliest electronic computers. Unlike its predecessor the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was a stored program computer....

. Research into ALUs remains an important part of computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, falling under Arithmetic and logic structures in the ACM Computing Classification System

ACM Computing Classification System

The ACM Computing Classification System is a subject classification system for computer science devised by the Association for Computing Machinery...

Numerical systems

An ALU must process numbers using the same format as the rest of the digital circuit. The format of modern processors is almost always the two's complement

Two's complement

The two's complement of a binary number is defined as the value obtained by subtracting the number from a large power of two...

binary number representation. Early computers used a wide variety of number systems, including ones' complement, two's complement sign-magnitude format, and even true decimal systems, with various representation of the digits.
ALUs for each one of these that makes it easier for the ALUs to calculate additions and subtractions.

The ones' complement and two's complement number systems allow for subtraction to be accomplished by adding the negative of a number in a very simple way which negates the need for specialized circuits to do subtraction; however, calculating the negative in two's complement requires adding a one to the low order bit and propagating the carry. An alternative way to do two's complement subtraction of A−B is to present a one to the carry input of the adder and use ¬B rather than B as the second input.

Practical overview

Most of a processor's operations are performed by one or more ALUs. An ALU loads data from input register

Processor register

In computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available as part of a CPU or other digital processor. Such registers are addressed by mechanisms other than main memory and can be accessed more quickly...

s, an external Control Unit

Control unit

A control unit in general is a central part of the machinery that controls its operation, provided that a piece of machinery is complex and organized enough to contain any such unit. One domain in which the term is specifically used is the area of computer design...

then tells the ALU what operation to perform on that data, and then the ALU stores its result into an output register. The Control Unit

Control unit

is responsible for moving the processed data between these registers, ALU and memory.

Simple operations

Most ALUs can perform the following operations:

Bitwise logic operations
Bitwise operation
A bitwise operation operates on one or more bit patterns or binary numerals at the level of their individual bits. This is used directly at the digital hardware level as well as in microcode, machine code and certain kinds of high level languages...

(AND
AND gate
The AND gate is a basic digital logic gate that implements logical conjunction - it behaves according to the truth table to the right. A HIGH output results only if both the inputs to the AND gate are HIGH . If neither or only one input to the AND gate is HIGH, a LOW output results...

, NOT, OR
OR gate
The OR gate is a digital logic gate that implements logical disjunction - it behaves according to the truth table to the right. A HIGH output results if one or both the inputs to the gate are HIGH . If neither input is HIGH, a LOW output results...

, XOR
NOR gate
The NOR gate is a digital logic gate that implements logical NOR - it behaves according to the truth table to the right. A HIGH output results if both the inputs to the gate are LOW . If one or both input is HIGH , a LOW output results. NOR is the result of the negation of the OR operator...

)
Integer
Integer (computer science)
In computer science, an integer is a datum of integral data type, a data type which represents some finite subset of the mathematical integers. Integral data types may be of different sizes and may or may not be allowed to contain negative values....

arithmetic operations (addition
Addition
Addition is a mathematical operation that represents combining collections of objects together into a larger collection. It is signified by the plus sign . For example, in the picture on the right, there are 3 + 2 apples—meaning three apples and two other apples—which is the same as five apples....

, subtraction
Subtraction
In arithmetic, subtraction is one of the four basic binary operations; it is the inverse of addition, meaning that if we start with any number and add any number and then subtract the same number we added, we return to the number we started with...

, and sometimes multiplication
Multiplication
Multiplication is the mathematical operation of scaling one number by another. It is one of the four basic operations in elementary arithmetic ....

and division
Division (mathematics)
right|thumb|200px|20 \div 4=5In mathematics, especially in elementary arithmetic, division is an arithmetic operation.Specifically, if c times b equals a, written:c \times b = a\,...

, though this is more expensive)
Bit-shifting operations (shifting or rotating a word by a specified number of bits to the left or right, with or without sign extension
Sign extension
Sign extension is the operation, in computer arithmetic, of increasing the number of bits of a binary number while preserving the number's sign and value...

). Shifts can be seen as multiplications and divisions by a power of two
Power of two
In mathematics, a power of two means a number of the form 2n where n is an integer, i.e. the result of exponentiation with as base the number two and as exponent the integer n....

.

Complex operations

Engineers can design an Arithmetic Logic Unit to calculate any operation. The more complex the operation, the more expensive the ALU is, the more space it uses in the processor, the more power it dissipates. Therefore, engineers compromise. They make the ALU powerful enough to make the processor fast, yet not so complex as to become prohibitive. For example, computing the square root of a number might use:

Calculation in a single clock Design an extraordinarily complex ALU that calculates the square root of any number in a single step.
Calculation pipeline Design a very complex ALU that calculates the square root of any number in several steps. The intermediate results go through a series of circuits arranged like a factory production line. The ALU can accept new numbers to calculate even before having finished the previous ones. The ALU can now produce numbers as fast as a single-clock ALU, although the results start to flow out of the ALU only after an initial delay.
Iterative calculation Design a complex ALU that calculates the square root through several steps. This usually relies on control from a complex control unit
Control unit
A control unit in general is a central part of the machinery that controls its operation, provided that a piece of machinery is complex and organized enough to contain any such unit. One domain in which the term is specifically used is the area of computer design...

with built-in microcode
Microcode
Microcode is a layer of hardware-level instructions and/or data structures involved in the implementation of higher level machine code instructions in many computers and other processors; it resides in special high-speed memory and translates machine instructions into sequences of detailed...

.
Co-processor Design a simple ALU in the processor, and sell a separate specialized and costly processor that the customer can install just beside this one, and implements one of the options above.
Software libraries Tell the programmers that there is no co-processor and there is no emulation
Emulator
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...

, so they will have to write their own algorithms to calculate square roots by software.
Software emulation Emulate the existence of the co-processor, that is, whenever a program attempts to perform the square root calculation, make the processor check if there is a co-processor present and use it if there is one; if there isn't one, interrupt
Interrupt
In computing, an interrupt is an asynchronous signal indicating the need for attention or a synchronous event in software indicating the need for a change in execution....

the processing of the program and invoke the operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

to perform the square root calculation through some software algorithm.

The options above go from the fastest and most expensive one to the slowest and least expensive one. Therefore, while even the simplest computer can calculate the most complicated formula, the simplest computers will usually take a long time doing that because of the several steps for calculating the formula.

Powerful processors like the Intel Core

Intel Core

Yonah was the code name for Intel's first generation of 65 nm process mobile microprocessors, based on the Banias/Dothan-core Pentium M microarchitecture. SIMD performance has been improved through the addition of SSE3 instructions and improvements to SSE and SSE2 implementations, while integer...

and AMD64 implement option #1 for several simple operations, #2 for the most common complex operations and #3 for the extremely complex operations.

Inputs and outputs

The inputs to the ALU are the data to be operated on (called operand

Operand

In mathematics, an operand is the object of a mathematical operation, a quantity on which an operation is performed.-Example :The following arithmetic expression shows an example of operators and operands:3 + 6 = 9\;...

s) and a code from the control unit

Control unit

indicating which operation to perform. Its output is the result of the computation.

In many designs the ALU also takes or generates as inputs or outputs a set of condition codes from or to a status register

Status register

A status register or flag register is a collection of flag bits for a processor. An example is the FLAGS register of the x86 architecture....

. These codes are used to indicate cases such as carry-in or carry-out, overflow

Arithmetic overflow

The term arithmetic overflow or simply overflow has the following meanings.# In a computer, the condition that occurs when a calculation produces a result that is greater in magnitude than that which a given register or storage location can store or represent.# In a computer, the amount by which a...

, divide-by-zero

Division by zero

In mathematics, division by zero is division where the divisor is zero. Such a division can be formally expressed as a / 0 where a is the dividend . Whether this expression can be assigned a well-defined value depends upon the mathematical setting...

, etc.
A [floating-point unit]] also performs arithmetic operations between two values, but they do so for numbers in floating-point

Floating point

In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...

representation, which is much more complicated than the two's complement

Two's complement

The two's complement of a binary number is defined as the value obtained by subtracting the number from a large power of two...

representation used in a typical ALU. In order to do these calculations, a FPU has several complex circuits built-in, including some internal ALUs.

In modern practice, engineers typically refer to the ALU as the circuit that performs integer arithmetic operations (like two's complement

Two's complement

The two's complement of a binary number is defined as the value obtained by subtracting the number from a large power of two...

and BCD

Binary-coded decimal

In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal is a digital encoding method for numbers using decimal notation, with each decimal digit represented by its own binary sequence. In BCD, a numeral is usually represented by four bits which, in general, represent the decimal range 0 through 9...

). Circuits that calculate more complex formats like floating point

Floating point

, complex numbers, etc. usually receive a more specific name such as FPU.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Numerical systems

Practical overview

Simple operations

Complex operations

Inputs and outputs

See also

External links