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 The instruction unit (I-unit or IU), also called, e.g., instruction fetch unit (IFU), instruction issue unit (IIU), instruction sequencing unit (ISU), in a central processing unit (CPU) is responsible for organizing program instructions to be fetch ...

. It may have its own internal control sequence unit (not to be confused with a CPU's main

control unit The control unit (CU) is a component of a computer's central processing unit (CPU) that directs the operation of the processor. A CU typically uses a binary decoder to convert coded instructions into timing and control signals that direct the op ...

), some

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), ...

s, and other internal units such as an

arithmetic logic unit In computing, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a Combinational logic, 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 ...

, 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 In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these ...

, 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 A superscalar processor (or multiple-issue processor) is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single in ...

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 {{Comp-eng-stub