Computers really are something intelligent, efficient, and even dangerous. What drives these machines, though, is a thin wafer of silicon and tiny transistors making up the processor or CPU. Early CPUs, however, were constructed from vacuum tubes that required an immense amount of space. That sounds odd that something now so small runs an entire computer, right? The kicker there is that this "computer brain" is limited to one process at a time.
The CPU connects to a socket in the motherboard within the computer, where it "takes up shop" for its operations. There is an illusion to CPUs and how they operate, if you want to call it that. A CPU can only do one thing at a time, but the illusion is that several things are happening at once, but really this is only achievable by the CPU switching between the processes running thousands of times a second. This can be mitigated using multicore processors that ease the workload, but each core can only perform one task at a time.
Now along with being able to only do one task at a time, the list of instructions your CPU can run is a viewable computer program.
CPUs have changed a lot over time just as technology has advanced, and while these components are small, they are mighty, and without them, our devices would be useless. Even though it may seem like these devices do it all at once, the reality we know is that the CPU performs one task at a time but switches thousands of times a second to give the illusion that it can process every request all at once and execute it.
Really makes you think if these brilliant machines can truly only "think" of one thing at a time in their brains, how much can we process within our own?
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