So you're shopping for a new computer in an electronics store and you're trying to make sense of the technical specifications. One computer that looks pretty cool has a 64-bit quad-core Intel i7 3.5 GHz processor. Sounds impressive, but what does it really mean?
The last computer you bought a few years ago had a sticker on it that said Pentium 4, but you don't remember the details. The computer was getting sort of slow, but why would you need a 64-bit quad-core? Why exactly is this better than the processor in your old computer? To understand what the specifications mean, we first have to look at how the processor is designed and how it functions.