How a computer works - Part 1 - What is a CPU?
Welcome to the really mysterious stuff. We are going to demystify a common "what is a CPU" question and begin unveiling the magic behind a computer system itself each time you press a "Power On" button on your computer case.
Let's continue with our analogy that we drew before about commonalities between leaving organisms and computer systems.
If you ask yourself, what organ of any mammals body responsible for thinking and directing behavior, you will see that this organ is brains. Without them, we would not be able to think, talk, control and direct our emotions and actions, build complex plans and thousands of other useful things that we do on a daily basis.
It would be strange if advanced computers, especially humanoid robots would not have possessed some sort of a logic module responsible for processing all the incoming information and producing an output readable for other applications in order to act as pre-programed.
So what is a CPU? Without computerized brains, it would be pretty much impossible to process all your, as a computer user, commands and calculations even such basic as of your software calculator. The brains of any computer system called a computer processing unit or a CPU for short.
CPUs play the cornerstone role in any computer system, whether when you buy it or try to build a desktop PC yourself. The power of a CPU is expressed in the MegaHertz or number of cycles processed per second and mostly determines not only the power of a CPU, but a whole computer.
There are two main competing corporations, producing CPUs, on the market: Intel and AMD. Both have their share of strong points and flaws. The main strengths of Intel CPUs are considered to be its stability and advanced architecture, when CPUs from AMD have usually won consumers' hearts by the economy of price and electricity consumption while offering a near the same performance.
That's it about CPUs. Next time we will talk about other components of a modern computer and how they work all together.
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