What is the difference between an execution core and a execution unit?
Solution 1:
An execution core consists of one or more execution units, a control unit, and various other parts. On modern CPUs, each core typically consists of more than one execution unit. A quad-core CPU has four cores. If it's hyper-threaded, then the execution units in each core can be shared by two threads simultaneously. Execution units perform the actual operations such as branching, mathematical operations, memory operations, and so on. Each core has a control unit which distributions instructions to the various execution units in the core.