Welcome to the third and final installment in the Be Your Own IT series entitled All About Central Processing Units and How They Work. In the previous two installments in this series, we discussed many different aspects of central processing units, how they work, and how your computer system uses your central processing unit to get different jobs done. Without a CPU, your computer simply won't work right, because the central processing unit is the brains of the operation, so to speak. It processes all of the information and data from the other components and parts in your syste
The faster your central processing unit is, the more you can get done simultaneously, but as we mentioned before, your central processing unit can only perform as quickly as the slowest of the other components in your computer can perform. If you have an extremely fast processor, but less than speedy RAM and other components, your central processing unit will spend much of its time idling around, waiting for more information to be delivered to it.
We mentioned before that each chip has transistors on it. The number of actual transistors on your own chip will vary depending on the manufacturer, make and model. The number of transistors found on your chip will also determine how well your central processing unit performs. The more transistors that are found on the chip, the more complicated the processes the chip can perform, and that, in turn, ups the speed and performance. Modern processors today carry many more transistors than their older counterparts, and they also make themselves more efficient and useful via a process called pipelining.
Without pipelining, a CPU can only perform one set of instructions at a time. This will significantly slow down a computer system, as it will be constantly waiting for more information and you will be unable to perform many tasks all at the same time. But with pipelining in place, it is possible to have many different sets of instructions running at the same time, each in a different stage of the process. These multiple instruction streams mean that more than one instruction will be capable of being completed during each clock cycle, and it takes a lot of transistors to set up on the chip. In fact, many of the fastest central processing units today are capable of processing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 billion instructions per second.
The most common type of central processing unit today is a 32 bit processor, but 64 bit processors are becoming more and more common in brand new computer systems. If you plan on buying a new computer within the next few years, you will likely find it comes with a 64 bit processor. New Windows operating system releases, such as Windows Vista and Windows 7, even provide support and functionality for 64 bit processors in addition to the software for the 32 bit processors as a matter of course.
Modern processors also have other things built in that provide even more efficiency, such as built in caching and a tendency towards special instructions designed to make specific tasks even more efficient than they would be otherwise.
When you are out and looking to buy a new CPU, or an entire new system, pay attention to the chip's specs. These numbers and various functions determine how well your CPU will perform, and in turn, how well your entire computer system will perform.
