The microprocessor is an integrated circuit that elaborates information in the form of digital signals. Not to be confused with a microcontroller, which embeds many additional devices to control embedded systems.
The microprocessor is an integrated circuit that elaborates information in the form of digital signals.
The discover of transistor made possible to build CPUs as integrated circuits, making possible the diffusion of computers. It allowed also an exponential grow in their computational power, in a fashion that has been described in 1970 by Gordon E. Moore:
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.