What is ALU?
ALU is a digital circuit that provides arithmetic and logic operations. It is the fundamental building block of the central processing unit of a computer. A modern central processing unit(CPU) has a very powerful ALU and it is complex in design. In addition to ALU modern CPU contains a control unit and a set of registers. Most of the operations are performed by one or more ALUs, which load data from the input register. Registers are a small amount of storage available to the CPU. These registers can be accessed very fast. The control unit tells ALU what operation to perform on the available data. After calculation/manipulation, the ALU stores the output in an output register.
The CPU can be divided into two sections: the data section and the control section. The data section is also known as the data path.
Introduction of ALU and Data Path
Representing and storing numbers were the basic operations of the computers of earlier times. The real go came when computation, manipulating numbers like adding and multiplying came into the picture. These operations are handled by the computer’s arithmetic logic unit (ALU). The ALU is the mathematical brain of a computer. The first ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) was indeed the INTEL 74181, which was implemented as part of the 7400 series TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) integrated circuits. It was released by Intel in 1970.