The Five State Processor Model
Michael K. Shannon
POS355
October 15th, 2014
Gary Teed

The Five State Processor Model
Our lives have become very dependent on computers. We use them for EVERYTHING from playing games, being the brains behind our phones to running our automobiles. As complicated as these have all become they all still depend on a microprocessor to make the decisions happen and all microprocessors have the same five state model used to make decisions on what runs when. These five states are new, running, ready, blocked, and exit (Sinapova, 2001). This paper will cover provide a brief explanation of each of these states.
The first state we will cover is the “new” state. The “new” state can simply be described as what a process becomes when it is first accessed by the user. You can think of this as when you double click an icon on your desktop. When the user double clicks the icon the processors receives a request to start up a new process and depending on what the processor is already doing will depend on how quickly it answers the request to start that application.
The second state we will cover is the “running” state. The “running” state can be thought of as a process that is currently being attended to by the processor. A simple example of this would be using the calculator function of the operating system and having it execute a simple math function.
The third state we will cover is the “ready” state. The “ready” state can simply be thought of as a process waiting to happen. The process will stand by until the processor has the time and/or resources to transfer the “ready” state process to a “running” process and execute the needed task.
The fourth state we will cover is the “blocked” state. The “blocked” state will usually occur when a “running” process runs into an error of some sort. An example of these errors could be an arithmetic error such as a process attempts a prohibited computation such has division by zero or stores numbers larger than the hardware can handle (Stallings, 2015).
The last state we will cover is the “exit” state. This state can simply be explained as the state a program becomes when its process becomes completed. An example of this is what the calculator function becomes once it has completed its computation.
In conclusion, our world has become dependent of complex computers to run our daily lives. These system have become very large and extremely complex but they all still have the basic five model processor at their cores. The five process were discussed in this paper to include new, ready, running, blocked, and exit.

References

Sinapova, L. (2001, July 17th). CmSc 335 Operating Systems. Retrieved from faculty.simpson.edu: faculty.simpson.edu/lydia.sinapova/www/cmsc335/cmsc335-01/CH03-Processes.htm
Stallings, W. (2015). Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, 8e. In W. Stallings, Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, 8e (pp. 105-148). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.