CPUs

If you’re building a computer from scratch or just trying to understand what’s under the hood, let me break down these CPUs for you. The CPU is like the brain of the operation; it takes all the instructions from your programs and apps and orchestrates getting work done. These days, they have billions of tiny transistor onto a single chips. That  slots into the motherboard, where all the magic happens. CPUs have multiple “cores”, so they can multitask better, like having four arms instead of two. Each core even has its own cache memory to quickly access your saved files instead of taking the long way around. Another big spec is clock speed; the gigahertz tells you how quickly it crunches numbers; faster is always more  for performance and CPUs speak codes like x86 or ARM, so the software can command them easily. Companies are in an endless pissing match, trying to one-up each other with newer generations that clock higher, pack more multi-core punch, and shrink those transistors down to the nanometer level. You can even overclock some CPUs yourself to squeeze out extra gigahertz, but that causes major heat, so cooling is clutch. At the end of the day, since the CPU is running the show under the hood, it makes a huge difference in how zippy your whole system feels. So pay attention when choosing the processor—get one powerful enough for your needs down the line.