Computer Processing Devices

To perform this transformation, the computer uses two components: the processor and memory. To process data or complete an instruction from a user or a program, the computer passes electricity through the circuits. As shown in Fig. 1 , the microprocessor is plugged into the computer’s motherboard. The motherboard is an example of a circuit board. In most personal computers, many internal devices—such as video cards, sound cards, disk controllers, and other devices—are housed on their own smaller circuit boards, which attach to the motherboard. In many newer computers, these devices are built directly into the motherboard. Some newer microprocessors are large and complex enough to require their own dedicated circuit boards, which plug into a special slot in the motherboard. You can think of the motherboard as the master circuit board in a computer. A personal computer's processor is usually a single chip or a set of chips contained on a circuit board. In some powerful computers, the processor consists of many chips and the circuit boards on which they are mounted. In either case, In the future, processors will have more cores that will be blistering fast and reduce power consumption. Software programmers will have to create multi-threaded applications to utilize the multiple cores. Computers with such processors will be faster for multimedia applications such as graphics software, audio players and video players. There is also a possibility that optical computing will increase processor speeds exponentially. All these signs point to a brighter future for processors, which will be to the benefit of everyone.