Common Non-Geek Mistake: "CPU"

[azurelunatic]

You know that boxy thing that is the brain of your computer? The thing you plug your keyboard and TV and mouse into?
You mean the CPU?

That exchange will heat my temper from nice and cool to near a full boil in under three seconds. "The CPU" is not, and never will be, the proper name of the box part of the computer, when the main parts of the computer are the monitor, the keyboard and mouse, and the boxy part that all of the above plugs into. CPU stands for "central processing unit", which is, on most household desktop or laptop computers, your Pentium chip, your Celeron, your Athlon -- not the whole honking box, but the smartest and hottest chip inside the box.

The standard household desktop computer has a fuckton of a lot more stuff inside the box than just the CPU. The CPU is usually in the middle of a contraption called the "motherboard", which has all sorts of slots and widgets to plug stuff into so that the computer's main brain can access all the niftiness. There are also hard drives, floppy drives, CD/DVD drives, sound cards, video cards, modems, ethernet cards, hard drives, power supplies, fans, and more than enough cable to satisfy a bored cat for at least a week.

Unfortunately, the Modern Inaccurate Use of Technical Terms Commission has seized onto the term "CPU" and has redefined it to (erroneously) refer to the whole goddamn box. End-users referring to the whole goddamn box as "the CPU" will either be laughed out of town when they call it this in front of someone who knows their computer's ports from a hole in the sand, or billed accordingly.

There is no one commonly accepted Geek Term to call the whole goddamn box. "Box" works. "Tower" works. "This piece what I'm kicking vigorously" will do in a pinch, provided you're kicking the right bit at the right time. There are probably a few more, but "box" and "tower" are the most common. "Case" will do, though that generally refers to the outside part and not the inside part. ("Computer" even works too, as many geeks view monitor, keyboard, and mouse as easily replaced peripherals not important to the proper functioning of the unit itself.) But if you call it "the CPU", or, just as bad, call the whole thing "the hard drive", prepare to be laughed out of town.

Comments

[divabat.livejournal.com]

That's odd. I've taken computing lessons, seen other computing lessons, talked to all sorts of geeks around the world - and NO ONE has mentioned the concept of CPU like you have.

Wouldn't technically that "box" be appropiately called a CPU anyway? All the chips and boards and drives are in there processing something. Inside that box is where most, if not all, of the computer's processing takes place. Hence Central Processing UNIT. that chip doesn't do processing alone.

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

I think it's just an among-us-geeks thing. Yeah, the box is not the CPU. It's just *not*. There is something *specific* called the CPU, and to call something else the CPU is to confuse. Terms must be delineatory amongst Geeks. We're linear that way.

We tend to be more free when discussing with non-geeks, so you may not have noticed. (Am assuming, when you say taking computer lessons and "talking with geeks". Apologies if the assumption is incorrect.)

[azurelunatic]

Amongst ourselves, we might refer to the process as "humoring the end-user", because it's not worth it getting in screaming fights over terminology when they're unlikely to ever need to know the right name for something.

[azurelunatic]

All of the processing goes on inside the box, but there are lots of things in the box that do not do actual processing, let alone being the one central thing that does all the processing, so no. It's something that a hardware geek would have an absolute screaming fit over, though it might pass a software geek by entirely. I've been trained in both.

[wibbble]

> that chip doesn't do processing alone.

Actually, it pretty much does. The only major exception these days is your graphics card - your GPU. Everything else just does support-work for the CPU.

[divabat.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. So what are all the other boards and chips there for?

*is not snarky, is genuinely curious*

[wibbble]

Most of them are what would have traditionally been described as peripherals, although these days that only covers things physically outside of the case.

You'll have, in a normal PC, a 'north bridge' and a 'south bridge', which will handle various things, most of which don't involve any actual /processing/. They handle getting one interface or bus to talk to another - like the PCI expansion bus, or the USB bus, or the memory bus, or the IDE drive bus. The CPU talks to those chips, and those chips talk to the bus - that way you don't need to develop a new CPU to support USB (say), you just need a chip on the motherboard (or on a PCI card) that does it.

/Some/ chips will do processing - for example, VIA's mini-ITX motherboards include chips which will decode DVD video rather than having the CPU do it. They also have hardware surround-sound decoding, and some have hardware (that is, a specific chip/part of a chip) processing for cryptography. The graphics card (also known as the GPU - Graphics Processing Unit) is the same - it handles processing for specific tasks, most of which are quite convoluted and math-heavy.

Even given that, the only bit on a normal computer that is capable of general purpose use is the CPU. Everything else is highly specialised and does one task only, and often that task isn't anything you could consider 'processing'.