- An Execution Cycle often requires more than one clock cycle to complete and has multiple steps to complete execution
- Fetch Instruction: Fetch instruction from the instruction queue
- Decode: Look at binary instruction and decode based upon args and opcode
- Execute: Executes the instruction and updates any flag bits
- Store Result: Store result in cache or main memory
- A more detailed description of this now follows
- Address of instruction placed on address bus
- Instruction fetched from memory and put on data bus and code is now available in code cache
- Instruction pointer determines which instruction to execute next (PC)
- Instruction decoder decodes and tells the control unit what type of instruction this is
- Control unit performs the operations needed to compute something reading data as it needs and writing when complete
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