The processor is considered to be the heart of any personal computer. It is thanks to him that he performs thousands of his operations, which the average user does not even know about. Today, there are thousands of all kinds of models on the component market. On many of them, such strange designations for the average person are attributed as: "processor capacity" or "clock frequency", etc. So what is it?
Each processor has a number of characteristics by which its capabilities are determined. The first step is the processor capacity. This parameter has a number of additional characteristics:
- bit depth of registers;
- the bus width of the processor itself;
- bit width of the memory bus.
The processor register is one of those billions of transistors that is position 0 or 1. In essence, this is a type of very fast RAM. Performing the most common addition operation, two registers act as an operand, and the logical result is moved to another cell (register). In other words, the processor capacity is the number of bits that the processor is able to process per cycle. This is what makes us create programs that work either in 32- bit systems or in 64- bit ones . Today, a 64-bit processor can be found at every step, because all of them are issued as such, but they also have an additional mode - a compatibility mode capable of executing 32-bit programs.
The processor core and the north bridge are connected by a main processor bus. Directly to the north bridge through the memory bus and graphics controller is connected a video card, RAM. Today, the development of the memory bus has reached its limit, since further growth can only lead to synchronization problems that would occur when all bits were transmitted simultaneously.
As for the memory address bus, it is used to transmit the address to which the RAM cell is located, where it will be written or read.
Another main characteristic of a processor is its clock speed. Thanks to this parameter, the speed with which the processor can perform its tasks is determined. The clock frequency of each processor is measured in hertz, as well as in its derived megahertz (MHz) and gigahertz (GHz). If the processor operates at a clock frequency of 2 GHz, it means that it can perform up to 2 billion operations per second.
The processor frequency is set by the clock generator, which is located on the motherboard or integrates into the chip itself in the system logic set. Conventionally, such a generator is a piece of quartz located in a tin case. An alternating voltage is supplied to it, which is why a current of precisely this frequency arises. The frequency directly depends on the shape and size of the quartz and, of course, on the magnitude of the voltage supplied to it. The lower the frequency, the higher the voltage. To supply less voltage, a thin process processor is required.
In order to find out the processor capacity, as well as its clock frequency, you can use small utilities that without any problems will display all the information on the screen. In addition, there are a number of other utilities that can increase the processor clock speed, since initially all processors have a frequency slightly lower than possible. This is done in order to extend the life of processors and give overclockers (overclocking fans) the opportunity to do what they love. But any "overclocking" of the processor is very dangerous and requires special skills, otherwise instead of speeding up work, you can simply disable it.