Have you heard of the companies Intel or AMD? These are two popular companies that manufacture the CPUs that go into our computers. All of the computers we use contain something called a central processing unit, also known as the CPU or the processor, which effectively acts as the brain of the computer.
Computers contain other processing units (like the graphics card!) that are responsible for processing other more specific things, but the CPU is your general powerhouse for all computing tasks. That being said, the CPU can do shockingly little. It can:
- Read values
- Set values
- Perform simple math calculations like addition, subtraction, and comparison
You hand it numbers, and it's put to work crunching the data however you'd like. That's it. Everything your computer doing is made up of just that. Isn't that wild?
Let's communicate with the CPU →
