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Computer architecture seems to be a very difficult area of computer engineering that I think needs further material. There are great conceptual explanations of how different units work with each other, particularly concerning registers in an MOS 6502 processor.

Here is a basic program counter: https://www.clear.rice.edu/elec422/1996/bomb/finalmw.html https://www.clear.rice.edu/elec422/1996/bomb/IMG00003.GIF

I've been perusing through a variety of textbooks particularly the following on Computer Systems:

David Patterson, John Hennessy: Computer Organization and Design, revised 4th edition, Morgan Kaufman, 2011. [Buy]

Randal Bryant, David O'Hallaron: Computer Systems, Prentice Hall, 2011. [Buy]

But I do not find any gate level circuitry drawings of program counters and other registers inside a processor.

It would be awesome for personal enrichment if anyone knows where I can find these schematics, it would be interesting to see what these look like in basic AND, OR, XOR, etc gates!

EDIT: I'm not particularly looking for a book, or resource, but rather ideally if anyone in our community has experience with drawing circuit diagrams for something like a program counter. I would be interested in seeing what they look like.

Keith Axelrod
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  • From the [help/on-topic]: *Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow*. – Ken White Oct 06 '16 at 00:38
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    A pipelined CPU doesn't really have a single program-counter register, since each stage of the pipeline is working on a different instruction. I love understanding low-level performance stuff (e.g. [Agner Fog's microarch guide for x86 CPUs](http://agner.org/optimize)), and I think it's interesting to have some idea of how a hardware adder / multipler / permute unit is implemented (and with what complexity / transistor count), but I think this is *too* low level to be a programming question. And unless I'm mistaken, modern CPUs don't really have a physical PC register. – Peter Cordes Oct 06 '16 at 00:46
  • Definately registers on the CPU http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures-software-developer-vol-1-manual.pdf – PHPDave Oct 06 '16 at 01:01

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Here's a counter using logic gates http://www.northdownfarm.co.uk/rory/tim/logic.htm

Learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiAbLltaz4A

Bunch of t flip flops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)

PHPDave
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