processors functions

What is a processor and what does it do?

The processor (often called the CPU) is the brain of your PC and is where the majority of the work is performed.

As its name suggests a processor processes something, that something is data, this data is made up of 0's and 1's (zeroes and ones).

To understand a processor we first need to take a quick look at the way digital systems function. All of the work that goes on inside your PC is carried out by the means of voltage, or more accurately the difference in two voltages.

Processor Architecture

A processor (as stated earlier) processes bits (binary digits) of data. In its simplest form, the processor will retrieve some data, perform some process on that data, and then store the result in either its own internal memory (cache) or the systems memory
.

You may have seen processors advertised as 32-bit or 64-bit, this basically means that the processor can process internally either 32 bits or 64 bits of data at any one time.

This would theoretically make a 64-bit processor twice as fast as its 32-bit counterpart.

Software can also be defined as either 16-bit, 32-bit or 64-bit. You can probably see that theoretically, if you are using 64-bit software with a 32-bit processor then it would take two clock cycles (32-bits at a time) to process any one set of 64-bits, this is referred to as a bottleneck.