The Engineering that Runs the Digital World 🛠️⚙️💻 How do CPUs Work?
Branch Education
Nov 15, 2025 16:49
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Have you ever wondered how CPUs work? Well, in this video, we take a 3D animated tour of a Central Processing Unit and see exactly how it works. Central Processing Units, or CPUs, are incredibly complicated, and they practically run the modern world. CPUs can be found in every desktop computer, laptop, video game console, smartphone, and any other device you use on a daily basis. CPUs are built from tens of billions of transistors assembled into billions of logic gates, and essentially they're amazingly powerful calculators. But in reality, they're more like instruction-crunching and data-moving machines. All CPUs share a common DNA, which is the Fetch-Decode-Execute cycle. This cycle is both very powerful and a critical limitation of every CPU. So dive right in and we'll show you how CPUs work.
Table of Contents for How CPUs Work
We're working on more ambitious subjects like How AI Works
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Animation Director: Mike Radjabov
Primary Animators: Muazzam Azizova, Max Botirov
Secondary Animators: Parvesh Khatri, Sherdil Davronov
Research, Script and Editing: Teddy Tablante
Twitter: @teddytablante
Modeling: Prakash Kakadiya
Image and Thumbnail Editing: Randy Catequista, BJ Torrejos, Adam Silven
Voice Over: Phil Lee
Sound Design by Drilu: www.drilu.studio
Sound Design and Mix: Luis Huesca
Erratum: At 5 min 34sec in, we show a NAND logic gate, when it should be an AND logic gate- we've reviewed this video dozens of times, along with having many other expert reviewers, and somehow this glaring detail got through. Funny enough, we reviewed all the binary and many other elements in close detail, but because this was such a big thing, it's probably why it wasn't reviewed as thoroughly.
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Ken Shirriff's blog. "The 6502 microprocecssor chip"
Visual6502 (dot) org. "Visual Transistor-levl Simulation of the 6502 CPU"
Wikipedia contributors. "Control Unit", "CPU", "Instruction Register", "Integrated Circuit", "Memory Address Register", "Program Counter". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Visited November 11th 2025
WikiChip. "Cortex A77 Microarchitecture"
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