This document provides an overview of CPU hardware, including:
- A CPU contains many transistors and acts as the miniature calculator of a computer using a very fast clock.
- There are two main CPU architectures: RISC and CISC. RISC includes ARM and MIPS, while CISC includes x86 and VAX.
- CPUs use caches, have either little-endian or big-endian instruction ordering, can support multiple threads, and come in 32-bit or 64-bit varieties.