##Overview of what a cpu is, companies we are analysing, and what benchmarks are
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The CPU simply stands for central processing unit. The CPU is a chip in the computer that carries out instructions including, basic arithmetic, logical, control, and IO (input output) for all programs run through the computer. Basically if you do not have a CPU your computer will not work it is the brain, the powerhouse, the central processor for the computer. So with something so essential to the computer picking one that will fit your needs is extremely important. Some background information that will be useful to know for this paper is knowledge in CPU cores, clock speed, and CPI. The clock speed is the speed at which the clock ticks which is measured in gigahertz which is a billion hertz a second. Clock speed is normally abbreviated as GHz. An example is a CPU that runs at 3 GHz runs 3 billion clock ticks a second or 3 billion clock cycles a second. The CPI or clock cycles per instruction is a valuable variable to determine the performance of the processor. The CPI tells how many clock cycles the processor takes to complete one instruction. Finally CPU cores are multiple CPUs put together to form a multi-core processor. These multi-core processors are now just referred to as CPU's because of how frequent they are used; in-fact a single core CPU is almost impossible to find unless you are looking at old and outdated hardware. These multi-core processors have two different types of cores, physical and virtual. A physical core is exactly what it sounds like another physical CPU in the processor. A virtual core is a bit harder to explain but in layman terms it is a simulated CPU that is used in a CPU to split up the process load on that core.
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The Companies that we are analyzing are the two biggest names in computer hardware; Intel and AMD. AMD stands for Advanced Micro Devices that was founded in 1969. AMD in the public eye have been known for creating affordable CPU's, having a lot of physical cores, and having high clock speeds. Intel was founded in 1968 and in the public eye have been known for high end CPUs, focusing on less physical cores and more virtual cores, and having lower clock speed than AMD CPU's. While there are other processor companies exist they are not widely know and will not be used in this study. The reasoning for this is because those companies generally create mobile CPUs for use in phones, tablets, and other electronic devices. This study will focus on desktop computers and laptop CPUs. This study will exclude these mobile CPUs because of the availability of benchmarks for those processors.
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Benchmarks are important to consumers looking to buy a CPU. A benchmark is a comparison point at which the consumer can see if they are getting a good value for their money. These benchmarks do various tests to see how well a CPU performs under stress, at a normal workload, and for graphical processors how many frames per second the processor can get. A stress test will test a heavy instruction load generally a heavier load than would be found in a normal computer program run. This information can be useful to see how far you can push your computer with what it can do. A normal workload sounds just like what it sounds like; this workload closely resembles a normal instruction set run by an average program. For a graphical processor the test is on frames per second. Frames per second or FPS is how many frames of animation take place in a single second. This will determine how smooth an application looks. A standard fps for movies is 24 while the standard for computer applications is 60. Benchmarks are useful but determining how useful they can be is up for debate but as of now they are the best tool a consumer has for picking out a CPU.