In
computer engineering
Computer engineering (CoE or CpE) is a branch of electrical engineering and computer science that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineers n ...
, a load–store unit (LSU) is a specialized
execution unit
In computer engineering, an execution unit (E-unit or EU) is a part of the central processing unit (CPU) that performs the operations and calculations as instructed by the computer program. It may have its own internal control sequence unit (not ...
responsible for executing all load and store instructions, generating virtual addresses of load and store operations
and loading data from
memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remember ...
or storing it back to memory from
register
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts entertainment, and media Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), th ...
s.
[''Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk'' by Bruce Jacob, Spencer Ng, David Wang 2007 page 298]
The load–store unit usually includes a queue which acts as a waiting area for memory instructions, and the unit itself operates independently of other processor units.
Load–store units may also be used in
vector processing, and in such cases the term "load–store vector" may be used.
[''Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach'' by John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson 2011 pages 293-295]
Some load–store units are also capable of executing simple fixed-point and/or integer operations.
See also
*
Address generation unit
The address generation unit (AGU), sometimes also called address computation unit (ACU), is an execution unit inside central processing units (CPUs) that calculates addresses used by the CPU to access main memory. By having address calculations ...
*
Arithmetic–logic unit
In computing, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a combinational digital circuit that performs arithmetic and bitwise operations on integer binary numbers. This is in contrast to a floating-point unit (FPU), which operates on floating point n ...
*
Floating-point unit
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...
*
Load–store architecture
In computer engineering, a load–store architecture is an instruction set architecture that divides instructions into two categories: memory access ( load and store between memory and registers) and ALU operations (which only occur between regis ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Load-store unit
Computer architecture