Arithmetic and logical unit Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- ALU redirects here. Alternative meaning: Alu sequence.
An
arithmetic and logical unit (ALU) is one of the core components of all central processing units. It is capable of calculating the results of a wide variety of common computations. The most common available operations are the integer arithmetic operations of
addition, subtraction, and multiplication, the
bitwise logic operations of
AND,
NOT,
OR, and
XOR, and various shift operations. Typically, a standard ALU does not handle integer division or any
floating point operations. For these calculations a separate component, such as a divider or
floating point unit (FPU), is often used, although it is also possible that a
microcode program may use the ALU to emulate these operations.
The ALU takes as inputs, the data to be operated on and a code from the
control unit indicating which operation to perform, and for output provides the result of the computation. In some designs it may also take as input and output a set of condition codes, which can be used to indicate cases such as carry-in or carry-out, overflow, or other statuses.
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