The internals of most modern computer architectures (including x86) follow the Von Neumann architecture, illustrated in Figure 4-2. It has three hardware components:

As you can see in Figure 4-2, the CPU contains several components: The control unit gets instructions to execute from RAM using a register (the instruction pointer), which stores the address of the instruction to execute. Registers are the CPU’s basic data storage units and are often used to save time so that the CPU doesn’t need to access RAM. The arithmetic logic unit (ALU) executes an instruction fetched from RAM and places the results in registers or memory. The process of fetching and executing instruction after instruction is repeated as a program runs.