Welcome to The Drive, a weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space!

Fifty years ago this month, Intel introduced the first commercial microprocessor, the 4004. Microprocessors are tiny, general-purpose chips that use integrated circuits made up of transistors to ...

Computer engineers have developed a new AI method for accurately predicting the power consumption of any type of computer processor more than a trillion times per second while barely using any ...

Computer chipmakers have spent years strengthening processors against attacks that exploit the way modern CPUs predict what they will need to do next. But MIT researchers have discovered a new ...

The processors in today’s computers have grown tremendously in performance, capabilities and complexity over the past decade. Clock speed has skyrocketed, and size has dwindled, even as the number of ...

APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit. It refers to a kind of processor that combines a CPU and GPU into a single package. A CPU, or central processing unit, handles all of the logical and ...

As NPR marks its 50th anniversary, we look back at an innovation that also changed the world in 1971: the unveiling of the first commercially produced microprocessor. NPR turned 50 this year. And to ...

Fire up the 2013 remix of the Eagles "Desperado". Listen to the beat: That's 60 beats per minute, or to an engineer, 1 Hertz (Hz). Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" is around twice that. It sounds fast, but ...

In the eighties, computer processors became faster and faster, while memory access times stagnated and hindered additional performance increases. Something had to be done to speed up memory access and ...

CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the most important part of a computer. All the calculations needed to run a particular task or application on a computer are processed by the CPU. That’s why it is ...

PC freezing, going slow, or running into hitches where it shouldn’t? Even if you have one of the best processors, high CPU usage could be to blame. Unfortunately, if you aren’t too computer savvy, ...