Posts Tagged ‘computer cpu upgrade’

Detailed Information About Computer CPU

computer cpu

The Central Processing Unit, or CPU. A lot of people like to call the entire computer case the CPU, but actually, the CPU is a tiny chip connected directly to the motherboard, with a big fan connected directly to it. Without the fan, the CPU would burn up very quickly.

The CPU of a computer is the main lynchpin of the computer system. It is a small slab of silicone about 10mm (3/8ths of an inch) square and about 2mm thick, which has been etched and doped microscopically to form circuits, switches, transistors and other electronic components: hundreds of millions of these components are embedded in this tiny space. The rest of the physical size of the CPU is taken up by little connecting wires from these circuits to the 100 plus pins on the underside of the CPU chip, a couple of external components, and with heat transfer fins and fans which are needed to cool that little slab of silicone, which is doing 2800 million operations per second! (That’s for an average off the shelf 2.8GHz computer)

The CPU is mainly a calculating unit, and can do complex arithmetic functions. But the CPU is actually made up of a number of distinct modules with different functions, like ultrafast short term storage called cache, traffic control to control the data flows, like a traffic light, and arithmetic units to do the sums

There are two primary brands of CPU on the market right now, Intel & AMD. A better of the two is hard to state, but you can check Toms Hardware for more in depth hardware reviews

A CPU’s speed is measured in Megahertz or Gigahertz, ie 1 million operations per second (MHz) or 1000 million operations per second (GHz) Thus a 3.0GHZ CPU will be able to handle 3000 million operations per second. Bear in mind that a calculation or some takes quite a large number of “operations” to complete

One major misconception regarding CPU’s is that the bigger the number (the megahertz/gigahertz), the faster the CPU. While this is generally true, there are several other factors that effect the overall speed of the CPU.

Front Side Bus – Regulates the speed of communication between the Ram and the CPU

Onboard Cache - Comparable to Ram, except used strictly by the CPU to speed up calculations

So the next time you’re shopping for CPU’s, remember to not only look at the CPU speed, but check out the other factors most people don’t generally notice

One thing to note about CPU’s is that you can’t just slap any CPU into any Motherboard. The Motherboard must support your specific CPU, which can make upgrades very hairy, so typically, if you’re going to upgrade one, it’s a good idea to upgrade the other. See more on Motherboards on the Motherboard page.

See another guide on computer desktops