Introduction to Intel Architecture

Intel architecture is a powerful computing architecture that utilizes some fundamental ingredients for specific functions. The basic workings of these ingredients may not be intuitive to those who have never designed with Intel architecture in the past. The goal of this paper is to describe the basic operation and function to the platform for the ingredients used in three classes of Intel architecture platforms. The paper will focus on the platforms featuring the Intel Atom processor, the Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and the Intel Core i7 processor. The paper will walk through the operation of a processing core's communication with memory and I/O, the path of interaction between different types of I/O and memory, and a high level description of how the CPU gets and utilizes data.