the.com/processor
a sliver of sand bullied into doing billions of math problems per second
means A processor is the component (or person) that performs operations on something — most often the chip at a computer's core that executes instructions, though it can also mean anything or anyone that handles and transforms input into output.
from From the verb 'process,' which came through Old French 'proces' from Latin 'processus,' meaning 'an advance, a going forward' — built from 'pro-' (forward) and 'cedere' (to go), the same 'cedere' lurking in 'proceed,' 'recede,' and 'succeed.' A processor, then, is literally a thing that makes matters go forward. The '-or' suffix is the old Latin agent ending that turns a doer into a noun. The computing sense is a 20th-century application of this much older word for any agent of advancement.
- raw material
- made mostly from purified silicon, basically refined sand
- clock speed
- modern chips cycle billions of times per second
- transistor count
- top chips pack tens of billions of transistors
- feature size
- circuits etched at just a few nanometers wide
- heat problem
- can run hotter per area than a stove burner
intel core i9-14900k — flagship cpu with 24 cores released in 2024
apple m4 max — arm-based chip with 12 cores in macbook pro 2024
qualcomm snapdragon x elite — 12-core processor for windows laptops launched 2024