A Fundamental Idea
The Fetch/Execute Cycle is a fundamental idea …
Instructions can be deterministically executed by the F/E process …
- Get the next task to do (Fetch, with PC specifying what’s “next”)
- Figure out what to do (Decode)
- Gather the necessary information to do the task (Operand fetch)
- Perform the task (Execute)
- Identify the next task (Increment the PC)
Computer systems contain many instances of this idea:
- Browsers use F/E cycle to interpret your HTML
- Visual Basic 6.0 Interpreter … will see this next week
- Java Byte Code Interpreter … makes the “motion” on web pages