The central processing unit (CPU) of a computer is like your machine's high-intensity, caffeine-addled manager, coordinating projects and making quick decisions on critical tasks. Some like to say it's the brains of your computer, but the truth is that processors still just do what you and the software tell it to do. Still the speed and architecture of computer processors have a profound effect on the speed and efficiency with with the rest of the devices can operate. Processors are fundamentally simple in that they take an incoming signal, perform some simple operation from the instruction, and pass back a result. The amazing part then is that processors today can handle over 3 billion operations per second and the wiring map inside the main chip has been miniaturized to a microscopic scale.

The central processor used to be built from a large grid of glass vacuum tubes as transistors, and a computer would fill large rooms. Now the transistor are made with tiny deposits of special materials printed on silicon wafers. Big chip makers Intel, AMD and Motorola have built vast assembly plants and have invested heavily in researching and designing more complex and rapid processors and the progress has been a steady pace for many years. As the size of the circuits shrinks and the speeds increase the current architecture of these computing devices is reaching a natural limit due to the out of this world physics of extremely small particles, such as atoms. Chip builders are reaching a point where the circuits are so small that they have to factor in quantum physics, but that is less daunting for some bold engineers who are looking for ways to harness the power of new rules to the game at the sub-atomic world. This could lead to processors many times smaller and vastly more rapid in making computations.

For now the rest of the engineers are trying out different ways of building the chips and of writing low level instructions to make the current hardware work more efficiently. There are some who have looked into making the computer bigger instead of smaller to make it more powerful. Boutique computer manufacturers like Cray once built enormous monster computers that were designed to far outpace the speed and efficiency of regular computer processor chips. These "supercomputers" could tackle problems that would take ordinary machines years or even centuries to solve. More recently the idea of linking many computers together has brought the advantages of distributed processing, where the CPUs of many computers put their heads together for great synergy. We continue to develop processors with dazzling power, but the truth is that we'll always want something faster.