Friday, April 1, 2011

Your CPU is NOT your tower...


Ok layman, today is the last day you will refer to the box that houses your motherboard and other components as a "CPU."

CPU stands for central processing unit. Think of your CPU as the brains behind your computer's operation. Without the CPU your computer is a large paperweight. It's much like your own brain. 

What does the CPU do you ask? Like I said before the CPU is the brain of the computer. It's much like your own brain. When you want to do something your brain processes what it needs to and tells the corresponding parts to act in kind. 

The CPU processes operations. Something needs to be called from RAM? The processor gets the ball moving. Need to execute instructions? Call the processor.

How it's done is a bit more confusing. With millions of transistors the Arithmetic Logic Unit (which is part of your CPU) uses logic gates to carry out simple arithmetic.  Logic gates are beyond this blog post but just understand that they use binary to carry out the mathematical operations. These calculations are eventually converted into assembly code which can then perform more complex operations.

Speed is a pretty big deal with processors. I'm sure you've heard the terms megaherz and gigahertz thrown around quite a big. But what exactly does a megahertz or gigahertz mean?

It's actually pretty easy 1 megahertz = 1 million cycles per second.  1 gigahertz = 1 billion cycles per second. Understanding what goes on during those cycles... well... that's for another blog.

Fun fact: The first Intel processor only had 2,300 transistors. Todays processors have over 2 billion!

14 comments:

  1. yeah i never understood why people think those two words should be synonymous

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  2. Good call on explaining this to people.

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  3. Probably because people thought that it was some sort of weird geeky abbreviation for ComPUter. I was guilt of that when I was in elementary school.

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  4. I think this is useful as there are still a lot of people who absolutely no knowledge about computers.

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  5. I was around 10 when I knew this. :x

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  6. Ha! Yeah, thats funny, what Pentele said.

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  7. Oh man, I hate trying to explain computer parts to my father.

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  8. Great blog mate, I'm not gonna lie when it comes to computer hardware I'm completely stumped. Hopefully I can pick up bits and pieces from this.

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  9. interesting post, very informative

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  10. Have you seen the new quamtum processors. uuuummmmm its in your tower and not in your tower all at the same time

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  11. wow, interesting facts, I didn't know any of this stuff :p
    following

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  12. Nice fact at the end there!

    one step closer to making my own pc!

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