3.7 Concluding Thoughts

Microprocessors are some of the most complex devices per square centimeter that humanity has ever constructed , and understanding how they function is extremely challenging. I hope this chapter has given you some sense of that complexity, along with furthering your understanding and helping you prepare to measure a processor's performance in a dynamic system.

We've covered a lot, from the fundamentals of microprocessor design, to bus and crossbar architectures, to discussing caching and peripheral interconnects. This is a lot of information to grasp, but the payoff of understanding how these components function and interact with each other is commensurately large.