A look inside the processor

The great mystery of the PC is what takes place inside its circuitry .How can this box of chips, wires, and other parts -most of which don't move- do its work?
A processor's performance -even its capability to function- is dictated by its design, or architecture . A chip's architecture determines where its parts are located and connected, how it with other parts of the computer, and much more. It also determines the path that electricity(in the form of moving electrons)takes as it moves through the processor, turning its transistors on and off. There are many different chip architectures in use today, and each family of PC processors is based on its own unique architecture.
In fact, processors are differentiated by their architecture. The processors of IBM PCs and Macintosh computers have such different architectures, for example, that they cannot even run the same software; operating systems and programs must be written to run on each processor specific architecture, to meet its requirements.
A processor's architecture determines how many transistors it has, and therefore the processor's power. Simply stated, the more transistors on a processor, the more powerful the it is. The earliest microprocessors had a few thousand transistors. The processors in today's PCs contain tens of millions. In the most powerful workstations and server computers, a processors may contain hundreds of millions of transistors. When a computer is configured to use multiple processor, it can ultimately contain billions of transistors.
A processors includes many other features that affect its performance. For example, a processors performance is affected by the number of bits of data it can process at any one of time. Currently, nearly all standard PC processors move data in 32-bit chunks; they are called"32-bit processors". In 2003 American Micro Devices(AMD) released a new generation of desktop PC processor that can handle 64-bits of data .(High-end workstations and many minicomputers systems have used 64-bit processors for about a decade).