What is a CPU? Everything you need to know about central processing units

In the early days of computing, processors had only one processing core, built to perform one task at a time. But as technology advanced, so did the tasks people demanded of computers. This meant that the number of required cores had to increase. Computers with multiple cores can perform several tasks simultaneously and perform them faster. Now you would be hard pressed to find a processor with less than two cores. CPUs from Intel and AMD nowadays even have up to 32 cores.

Processors today also perform multithreading, which means that each core within the processor splits itself into multiple virtual cores called threads. A dual-core CPU typically has four threads, a quad-core typically has eight, and a 32-core processor typically has 64 threads. Then there’s the processor clock speed, which is just as important to performance as the cores and threads.

A CPU’s clock speed determines how quickly each core processes the workload. Speed ​​is measured in gigahertz (GHz), which indicates how many cycles (or steps a computer takes to meet a demand) are handled in a second. For example, a processor with a clock speed of 3GHz completes 3 billion cycles per second. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean that a 3.2GHz processor from 2015 is necessarily better than a 2GHz CPU from 2024. That’s because engineers design the architecture of newer processors to be more efficient. As a result, it is better to compare models of the same generation when looking for a CPU.