text: What is a CPU? A guide to the 'brain' of your computer or phone, including how it works | Tech Security Update
  March 4, 2021 Allana Akhtar Uncategorized Comments Off on What is a CPU? A guide to the 'brain' of your computer or phone, including how it works
  A CPU, or central processing unit, is the most important part of your computer. It's found on the motherboard and is responsible for executing every command you or an app makes. It opens apps, loads data, shows images - the CPU is involved with nearly everything on your computer.
  Since the CPU is handling data from every part of the computer at once, it's easy to overload a CPU by flooding it with commands. This is why your computer goes slower when you have too many programs open - you're constantly sending new data for the CPU to deal with.
  Although some of these CPUs are faster than others, they're all largely interchangeable because they all use a "x86 instruction set" - that's where the name comes from. In short, they all speak the same language, and can all understand and perform commands that the rest of the computer sends.
  The clock speed of the CPU - measured in gigahertz (GHz), or a billion cycles per second - is a measure of how many instructions the CPU can perform in a particular period of time.
  You also have to consider how many cores your CPU has. Most modern CPUs are multi-core, which means they can divide incoming data and decode all the parts at once. It's like having six workers in an office compared to just one - much more efficient. Programs which are optimized for multi-threaded and multi-core CPUs can run dramatically faster.
  Another component that affects the performance of a CPU is the cache. Most CPUs have multiple caches, such as L1, L2, and L3. Each cache has a specific purpose. The L3 cache, for example, is faster than the computer's main memory and is used to feed data and instructions to the cores without bothering the other caches.
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