The following is one in a series of MacCentral excerpts from Dan's latest book, The Ultimate iMac Book . By now everybody knows what's on the outside of an iMac. But in terms of computational power, a microprocessor is an incredible little piece of circuitry.
Raw data flows into the microprocessor, is manipulated, and emerges as something meaningful.
My former physics and computer engineering professors would be pulling their hair out if they read that very figurative explanation, but you get the point. The microprocessor makes things happen. And the faster a microprocessor works, the faster things happen. The first iMacs shipped with a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 microprocessor. At this writing, iMacs are shipping with a 266 MHz PowerPC G3 microprocessor.