Nick, i stumbled across this tonight.. it looked relevant to your topic.

if not, disregard it.

Crono, think you could look over the following entries to the article?

The transistor has 7 parts, 3 aluminum leads, called the source, the drain, and the gate. There is also a layer of Silicon Dioxide, to which a narrow strip of Polysilicon is found within, and connected to the gate. Bellow the silicon dioxide are two other pieces of silicon, an N-type and a P-type of silicon. Together each of these 7 parts comprise the transistor, however the real magic is accomplished with the source, drain, and N and P type silicon pieces. Everything starts when a positive charge is sent down the gate at the top of the transistor. This lead is connected to the Polysilicon strip which in turn becomes positively charged. This will attract electrons from the P-type silicon to the top, allowing a positive current to then pass from the source lead on the left, under the P-type silicon via the N-type silicon, and then to pass to the drain, turning on the transistor, and in computer language, defining a bit. If the gate is negatively charged, the the polysilicon is also charged negatively, repelling the electrons in the silicon and cutting off the flow between the source and the drain.

What this means is that the processor can work with 32 bits of data every clock cycle. Meaning 32 transistors, 32 1s and 0s.

So a processor operating at 1Mhz executes 1 million cycles per second, resulting in 32 million bits of data processed per second.

You might have heard of the Pentium 4A, P4B, P4C, and P4E and now the P4EE. The letter suffixes was used by Intel to separate the Pentium 4 model between the different cores, identifying different features. The Pentium 4A Willamette, for example, was the first version of the P4 and came out using the socket 423 which is now discontinued, as all other Pentium 4 models use the 478-pin socket. Here is the breakdown:

Pentium 4 A = Willamette
Pentium 4 B = Northwood
Pentium 4 C = Prescott
Pentium 4 E = Prescott with HTT technology
Pentium 4 EE = LGA 775 socket

DDR SDRAM was the next step in the ever so evolving state of DRAM. Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory was an improvement to the older SDRAM. DDR SDRAM has two major improvements over SDRAM. The first, is it's ability to go to higher speeds, ranging from 133Mhz to 200Mhz. The effective speed however, which is used by the industry, is between 266Mhz and 400Mhz. The second feature, and most important one, the reason why it is called 'Double Data Rate' is because it sends data on both the rising and falling parts of the clock cycle. So for each wavelength, data would be sent twice, at the crest and at the trough.

Newer DDR2 SDRAM has appeared only a short time ago, but hasn't really become popular due to its high cost. DDR2 RAM uses 240-pin SIMMs and DIMMs making them once again incompatible with 184-pin DDR slots. DDR2 SDRAM clocks between a physical 200Mhz and 333Mhz, meaning an effective 400Mhz and 667Mhz, improving over the speeds of current DDR.

For example, in my laptop, I have a SoDIMM module for 128mb SDRAM. Each side contains 4 ICs, meaning there is a total of 8 integrated circuits, which provide the 128mb total memory. On the sticker on the side of the RAM stick, you can see how the memory is organized, in this case, my SoDIMM module says "16Mx64". This means that each IC chip contains 16mb of memory arranged along 64 Column Address Select pipelines, which, physically go up and down the longer part of the IC chip. From there you can figure out how many RAS pipelines there are by calculating the amount of bits in 16mb and then dividing that number by the number of CAS pipelines, in this case, 64. There are a total of 134 217 728bits in 16mb, therefore dividing 134 217 728 by 16 gives 8 388 608 which would mean that each IC chip on your RAM module contains 64 CAS pipelines and 8 388 608 RAS pipelines. This means that each chip contains 134 217 728 memory cells, to which each hold one bit of data.

We commonly say that 1000bytes is 1kilobyte, but it is not. 1kb is equivalent to 1024bytes, this due to the fact that 1byte is equal to 8bits. This can often cause confusion, and this is the reason why a 80gb hard drive only contains 74gb. Same with a 120gb HDD (Hard Drive Disk) which only really contains 111gb - Once again, 1000kb is often used to represent 1megabyte, when in fact it is 1024kb. The next step after megabytes is gigabytes, a term which has been around for under 10 years. And recently introduced to the public is the term terabyte, which signifies 1000gb, when in fact it is 1024. This would mean that a 1tb hard drive is announced as having 10 000 000 000 000bits when in reality it contains 8 796 093 022 208bits.

It is also called the PC, short for Personal Computer, a term that was used when the first home computers were introduced in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

Thanks.

Also, I have started off by talking about architecture instead of the CPU, and have revised the CPU part. I know it was a mess. The other sections should be in order though, you can read them over, such as mobo, RAM and HDD.