Trapped Lightning: The CPU Instruction Cycle

Your phone isn't actually smart, it is just terrifyingly fast at following orders.

Inside that chip, there is a frantic loop happening billions of times a second called the Instruction

Cycle. The CPU fetches a command, decodes what it means,

and executes it. The Control Unit acts like a traffic cop directing data, while the ALU crunches

the actual math. They use tiny storage spots called Registers because going all the way to the main

memory takes too long. We basically trapped lightning inside a rock to make it

do math, and now that rock runs your entire life.