Processor Cooling
This gray or silver paste goes between the CPU and the heat sink to help transfer heat?
What is thermal paste?
Ultra-fast storage element, built from D flip-flops, forms the fundamental building block of a CPU's register file.
What is a register?
This internal timing device generates continuous electrical pulses to synchronize all of a computer's operations.
What is the system clock?
This hardened material is commonly used for case side panels.
What is tempered glass?
The first step of the machine cycle retrieves an instruction from memory using the program counter
What is Fetch?
This cooling system uses metal fins and a fan attached directly to the processor.
What is an active heat sink (or air cooler)?
Manage multiple registers efficiently, hardware designers use this combinational logic circuit to select which register's data is routed to the ALU.
What is a multiplexer (or MUX)?
Measured in gigahertz (GHz) today, determines how many billions of clock cycles a CPU can execute per second.
What is clock speed (or clock rate)?
This is usually installed at the very bottom or top of the case to feed electricity to the system.
What is the power supply unit?
During this second step, the control unit figures out what the fetched instruction actually means.
What is Decode?
This type of cooling system uses pumps, tubes, and a liquid coolant to lower CPU temperatures.
What is liquid cooling?
specialized register holds the memory address of the next instruction waiting to be fetched and executed by the processor.
What is the Program Counter (PC)?
This tiny mineral slice vibrates at a precise frequency when electricity is applied, acting as the heart of the system clock.
What is a quartz crystal?
To prevent overheating, cases use these built-in spinning components to pull cool air in and push hot air out.
What are case fans?
This component of the CPU performs the actual arithmetic and logical operations during the execute phase.
What is the ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit)?
This safety feature slows down the processor automatically when it gets too hot to prevent permanent damage.
What is thermal throttling?
This specific control line must be driven high (asserted) during the clock cycle to successfully save data into a targeted register.
What is the Write Enable line (or WE)?
It is the term for the single smallest unit of time recognized by a CPU.
What is a clock cycle (or tick)?
This net-like mesh sheet sits over case intakes to catch particles before they can settle on your graphics card or processor.
What is a dust filter?
This special register holds the memory address of the next instruction waiting to be fetched.
What is the Program Counter (PC)?
Type of heat sink cools using only metal conduction and radiation without using any moving parts or fans.
What is a passive heat sink?
Acts as a temporary holding zone for data that was just read from or is about to be written to system RAM.
What is the Memory Data Register?
This keeps track of the current time and date even when the computer is completely powered down.
What is the Real-Time Clock (RTC)?
This determines whether a motherboard will physically fit inside a specific chassis.
What is a form factor?
The final phase of the cycle writes the processed result back to internal registers or memory.
What is Store (or Writeback)?