system
A chat on 4chan
human
tell me more about CPUs and your journey to understanding pls, super interesting
gpt
Pic related, it's a pretty old CPU at this point.

First of all, you have to understand that CPUs are made mostly from transistors.
A transistor is an electrical component with three connections. If both inputs are electrified, then the output is electrified as well.
You use a bunch of these transistors to build half-adders, which you combine to full-adders.
A full-adder can add two binary numbers. It has two outputs, one for each digit of the result.
A bunch of full-adders are chained to create addition mechanisms.
This is all a CPU does. It's all additions.
There is no multiplication. There is no substraction. And there sure as fuck is no division.
It's all addition of binary numbers. That's it.

Try to wrap your head around that.

In addition to that, a CPU has registers and an instruction set. Registers are simply electrical buffers that can store a sequence of ones and zeroes for later use. The instruction set is a dedicated part of a CPU that contains all of the instructions that it can execute.
Well, kinda. Modern day CPUs use microcode. Their instruction set is in software.
Oh and they don't just execute commands. They execute them speculatively.
Hyper-Threading means that a CPU will execute the current command and pre-load the next one to speed up the execution queue.
If they next command cannot be determined, the CPU simply executes the most likely next command and keeps the result if it turns out to be the right one.
Yes, CPUs guess their next step based on a heuristic.
I already mentioned CPU faults. All CPUs actually have error correction mechanisms, as they are constantly fucking up due to cosmic radiation, quantum tunneling and manufacturing errors.

Again, this is a fancy addition machine.

The only other component is the timer. What it basically does is send regular pulses that tell the system to progress a step. This is done a few billion times each second.

And then there's the concept of booting.
human
HUH`?????