CPU – Central Processing Unit – A microprocessor is the heart of the computer, it is a single chip that coordinates all data, runs the OS and programs.

The CPU is a collection of electronic circuits that work together to transfer data and perform operations on that data. The operations that can be performed are called the Instruction set and Intel Computers today use the x86_64 instruction set. We have a number of CPU makers today, Intel, AMD, ARM, and now Apple are the key manufactures of CPU’s for computers. But there are also a larger number of smaller more agile processors on the market. The computer processor industry is still growing rapdily even with all of the growth over the past 40 years.

Computer Processor chips typically contain multiple cores, a core is most of the functional part of the CPU, a Processor with 4 cores can operate on 4 threads at any one time. A thread is a program that has been loaded into memory. Although computers can run thousands of threads, the processor is shared amongst them by the scheduler in the Kernel. The Kernel is the heart of any Operating System, and manages the schedule and data handling.