What is a processor

What is the processor in a computer?

At its core, the processor inside your computer is the entire brains of the operation, so to speak. It carries out program functions, computes data from input, and helps manage and coordinate the activity of many other system components like memory, peripherals, and display output.

What does a processor do?

The main function of a computer processor is to crunch numbers and produce an output. That might sound simplistic, but even as it is simple conceptually, in practice, the ability of silicon chips to operate using advanced logic and even remember actions it already took or data it has already computed is an incredible feat.

It does all this by using the flow of electrons through transistors etched into the silicon by an advanced form of lithography. These transistors act as gates that can permit or stop the flow of electrons, and engineers use these gates to create advanced logical structures that can add two numbers together, store data, and do pretty much anything else a modern computer can do.

What are the types of processors for computers

Generally, there are two brands of consumer processors that customers will buy: AMD and Intel. Both brands make a wide variety of chips, including lowly budget offerings to high-performance computing (HPC) processors like Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc.

This doesn't count ARM, which is actually a company that licenses out its processor design to others who then go on to produce it according to their specs and modifications.

Processors can also have varying numbers of cores, which are subdivisions of a processor that act independently of one another to improve speed and performance. Generally, the higher the core count, the more premium the processor.

There is also the matter of the graphics card, which has its own processor (the GPU, as opposed to the computer's main CPU) to perform the advanced digital rendering for gaming and video.

Other systems might have dedicated chips set aside for specific tasks like security to help things flow more easily, but there will always be a central processing unit to manage the activities of other processors subordinate to it