Word: microprocessor
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Mounted on the circuit board is a microprocessor, which is housed in a protective container and connected to rows of gold-plated pins...
Inside the microprocessor package is the chip itself. This tiny square of silicon is packed with transistors that process instructions and data for the computer...
Intel, of course, has done much more than survive. Founded in the summer of 1968 by Gordon Moore (one of the great chemists of the century) and Robert Noyce (a co-inventor of the integrated circuit), it has blossomed under Grove's leadership into the world's pre-eminent microprocessor manufacturer. From a standing start in 1981, when IBM introduced the first personal computers, they have populated the planet at an astounding rate. And of the 83 million machines sold this year, nearly 90% get their kick from an Intel chip. So do antilock brakes, Internet servers, cell phones...
...microprocessor acts as the brain of the computer, and it doles out instructions for every component...
...second problem was more subtle: a wire that is .25 microns wide is so small that once you've built it, you can't touch it. So instead of trying to unroll tiny wires onto silicon chips, microprocessor engineers laid down a thin sheet of metal and etched away everything they didn't want. What was left were microscopic paths of metal just wide enough to carry a current. But while chipmakers had developed any number of ways to etch aluminum, no one had yet figured out how to etch copper. Doing that, IBM suspected, would require inventing a whole...