The processor

The processor can be considered to be the ‘engine’ of the computer because it executes the lion’s share of the information processing; the processor fetches commands and necessary information from the RAM, carries out the tasks specified by the commands, and returns the processed information to the RAM.

The speed of a computer depends largely on the speed of the processor. The processor’s speed, in turn, is affected by various factors, such as the so-called clock frequency (usually expressed as gigahertz, GHz), the amount of cores and of the so-called cache memory inside the processor.