In
computer engineering
Computer engineering (CE, CoE, or CpE) is a branch of engineering specialized in developing computer hardware and software.
It integrates several fields of electrical engineering, electronics engineering and computer science.
Computer engi ...
, an execution unit (E-unit or EU) is a part of a
processing unit that performs the operations and calculations forwarded from the
instruction unit. It may have its own internal control sequence unit (not to be confused with a
CPU's main
control unit), some
registers, and other internal units such as an
arithmetic logic unit,
address generation unit,
floating-point unit
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multip ...
,
load–store unit,
branch execution unit or other smaller and more specific components, and can be tailored to support a certain
datatype, such as
integers
An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, ...), or the negation of a positive natural number (−1, −2, −3, ...). The negations or additive inverses of the positive natural numbers are referred to as negative in ...
or
floating-points.
It is common for modern processing units to have multiple parallel functional units within its execution units, which is referred to as
superscalar design.
The simplest arrangement is to use a single bus manager unit to manage the memory interface and the others to perform calculations. Additionally, modern execution units are usually
pipelined.
References
Central processing unit
Computer arithmetic
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