töötlemisüksus

Töötlemisüksus, known in English as a processing unit, is a component of a computer or other electronic device responsible for executing instructions of a computer program. The most common type of processing unit is the central processing unit (CPU), which performs arithmetic, logical, control and input/output operations. Other specialized processing units include graphics processing units (GPUs), which accelerate rendering of images and video, and digital signal processors (DSPs), which handle audio, speech and other real‑time signal manipulation tasks.

In a typical personal computer, a processing unit integrated into a single chip, often called an integrated circuit or microprocessor, serves as the brain of the system. It fetches instructions from memory, decodes them, and executes them in a cycle that repeats billions of times per second. The performance of a processing unit is measured by its clock speed, number of cores, cache size, and architectural features such as pipelining, superscalar execution and multicore parallelism.

Processing units are also found in servers, smartphones, embedded systems, and game consoles, where they run operating systems, applications and real‑time control loops. Advances in semiconductor technology and microarchitecture design continue to increase processing power while reducing power consumption and heat generation. This evolution underpins developments in fields ranging from artificial intelligence and scientific simulation to consumer media and industrial automation.