Execution Unit

Also referred to as Functional Unit in “Computer-Architecture-patterson-5th-edition.pdf”

A Functional Unit is the smallest unit in a CPU which can perform some operations

Examples of Execution Units are:

1. ALU: Integer Add, Mul, Shift
2. FP: Floating point Add, Mul
3. SIMD: Vector add, mul, shift
4. Load and Store

Inside a core of a processor, there can be multiple copies of above execution units. In such cases, the processor can be termed as Superscalar Processor

References

1. Wiki
2. Execution Units in Intel Haswell