My knowledge is very vague as all we have are visual diagrams etc, but we have m

Question

My knowledge is very vague as all we have are visual diagrams etc, but we have memory address and registers, the ALU being the heart(apparently). Single core CPUs process one instruction at a time AFAIK and multi-core have parallelism to some degree. So where do the millions of transistors come in and how do 32 registers manage everything. We have FPU's I know, how many transistors would these use roughly. Any way to get a fairly simple idea of what the bulk of the transistors do, why more means faster and how the registers 'manage' everything.

Explanation / Answer

This is a huge question. To fully answer it would take far more space than you'd want to read (not to mention that I suspect that there's a limit on the length of any SE answer), but I'll try to give you an idea of what goes on in the CPU.

First, a transistor (when used in a CPU) is essentially a switch, like a light switch except that you don't have to turn it on or off manually. Rather, it is controlled by an electrical current. The most important thing to understand is that modern computers are two-state devices: the only thing that really matters is whether a wire has a current or not.

One then begins the process of chip design by, for example, deciding how an integer (or other data) will be represented. For integers, say, the chip designers generally decide to them by ganging wires together in a logical unit, so with a collection of four wires it would be possible to represent 16 possible patterns: 0000,0001,

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