In
computer engineering
Computer engineering (CE, CoE, or CpE) is a branch of engineering specialized in developing computer hardware and software.
It integrates several fields of electrical engineering, electronics engineering and computer science.
Computer engi ...
, a load–store unit (LSU) is a specialized
execution unit
In computer engineering, an execution unit (E-unit or EU) is a part of a processing unit that performs the operations and calculations forwarded from the instruction unit. It may have its own internal control sequence unit (not to be confused w ...
responsible for executing all load and store instructions, generating virtual addresses of load and store operations
and loading data from
memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...
or storing it back to memory from
register
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), ...
s.
[''Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk'' by Bruce Jacob, Spencer Ng, David Wang 2007 page 298]
The load–store unit usually includes a queue which acts as a waiting area for memory instructions, and the unit itself operates independently of other processor units.
Load–store units may also be used in
vector processing
In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its Instruction (computer science), instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large Array d ...
, and in such cases the term "load–store vector" may be used.
[''Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach'' by John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson 2011 pages 293-295]
Some load–store units are also capable of executing simple fixed-point and/or integer operations.
See also
*
Address-generation unit
*
Arithmetic–logic unit
In computing, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a combinational digital circuit that performs arithmetic and bitwise operations on integer binary numbers. This is in contrast to a floating-point unit (FPU), which operates on floating point numbe ...
*
Floating-point unit
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multip ...
*
Load–store architecture
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Load-store unit
Computer architecture