CPU

Stands for "Central Processing Unit." This baby is the brain of your computer. It processes all basic instructions and pretty much runs the show. Any time something needs to be computed, it gets sent to the CPU. Every day, it's compute this, compute that -- you'd think the CPU would need a break after awhile. But no. It just keeps on processing. Amazing. The CPU is also referred to as the simply the processor. Some people refer the entire motherboard as the CPU, but that's just wrong.