How does a CPU work?

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Credit: Hadlee Simons / Android Authority


If you’ve read any of Android Authority‘s CPU deep dives, you’re hopefully a bona fide expert on the ins and outs of how processors work. But don’t worry if not. These topics are dense and require a lot of background knowledge to get to grips with fully. It’s taken me over a decade in the industry to learn all this, after all (and almost as long to write it down!).

With that in mind, an article like this is well overdue, especially with recent shifts in the mobile and laptop landscapes, like Copilot Plus PCs and Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon with custom CPUs. So, let’s go through everything you need to know about how CPUs work and how that influences the design decisions we see in today’s mobile processors. We’ll also talk about a few design concerns that are more applicable to Arm processors rather than those designed by AMD and Intel. But much of what we’ll discuss is universal to all application processors.




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