Imagine 2morrow™ - Hardware Basics Page

Welcome to our processor basics guide, in this section we aim to give you an idea of just what a processor is and what its job is.

What is a processor and what does it do?

The processor (often called the CPU) is the brain of your PC and is where the majority of the work is performed.

As its name suggests a processor processes something, that something is data, this data is made up of 0's and 1's (zeroes and ones).

To understand a processor we first need to take a quick look at the way digital systems function, all of the work that goes on inside your PC is carried out by the means of voltage, or more accurately the difference in two voltages.

note: Voltage refers to the electrical unit. (for example a 12 Volt battery)

Digital systems use only two voltages, one which is a low voltage (usually between 0 and 1 volt) and one which is a high voltage (typically between 3 and 5 volts). These low and high voltages represent off and on respectively, a digital system will interpret these off and on states as 0 and 1, in other words if the voltage is low then it would represent 0 (off state), and if the voltage is high then it would represent a 1 (on state).

These zeroes and ones are called bits. The word bit is short for Binary Digit.
For example here are 8 bits (binary digits): 10010010
For more on binary see our guide to binary numbers.

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Processor Basics - A basic guide to the processor