The CPU is the most important part in your computer, and it is strikingly similar to the brain in the way that it works. CPU officially stands for Central Processing Unit; a central component in which all operations that you do on your computer go through at some point. To put it in a nutshell, the CPU will do all the calculations that make your computer work. It uses simple math, but does it faster than any human brain could hope to imagine. Just think about doing simple division like 12/2 in your head. That’s basically what the CPU does.
If we look at the hardware structure of the CPU, it has two large objects on top of it, and it is located near the center of a large circuit board. The two things on top of it are the heatsink and fan. They extract heat from the CPU, moving it to a different place in order to keep the CPU cool. The circuit board that surrounds the CPU is called the motherboard. It is like the nerve and vascular system in your body. It routes all the commands the CPU gives to the correct components, and even gives some of them power.
As we go into greater detail, the innards of a CPU are very complicated, much more complicated than what we will delve into in this article. Basically, a CPU will have one or more “cores” in it. These cores house billions of micro transistors that process information. The more cores, the merrier. When you type in something like 12/2 on your keyboard, the information is sent to the CPU, which then reads the information as 1s and 0s, or on and off. The transistors in the CPU will change (to on or off) according to this string of 1s and 0s, and then the data will be processed and you’ll be given the result, 6.
This leads into the performance of a CPU. A newer CPU will preform better than an old one. The newer CPUs get, the faster they can process the information you send them, and as such, the faster you can get things done. A lot of people will refer only to the GHz that a CPU produces; such as 2.6 GHz or 3 GHz. However, this only has a part in the performance of a CPU. Two very important other factors are the number of cores and the Cache size. If a processor has more cores, than it can process different tasks on separate cores, and therefore get both tasks done faster because it has more “brains” to process simultaneous information. Likewise, the Cache is the CPU’s temporary storage that it uses to store commands while it processes them. A larger Cache means the CPU can process larger tasks. There are other factors too, such as the socket type, and the FSB (front size bus) speed of the motherboard, but those aren’t as important to us now. All you need to know right now is that newer socket types (the names are cryptic) are better, and faster FSB speed is better.
Hopefully you now have some insight into how your computer works! The CPU is really an amazing piece of technology, and most people can’t even begin to grasp the copious amounts of engineering and intuitiveness that went into creating it. If you have any questions about anything I’ve said, feel free to post them in the comments section. The next article will be on some ways that you can make your CPUs job a little bit easier, so stay tuned!
