Some knife-edge CPUs have a large attached heat sink, so you may need to be very careful inserting and removing them. If you have a fan attached to your heat sink, you will need to power it somehow. Motherboards that take CPUs with these heat sinks will have a set of power pins nearby that you shouldn't have trouble identifying. Make sure you don't plug in the connector backwards. The CPU can do all of your calculations for you, but without a place to hold the data, it would be pretty useless.
Memory is the place where all of the information that the CPU works with directly is stored.
Note that the CPU doesn't work with all of your data all at once. Memory is a limited resource, and having less memory means you will need to get data for your CPU from other places more often. Moving this data into memory so the CPU can see it is a time-consuming process, and will slow down your performance. The first type of memory is called ROM , for read-only memory. Many computers these days have drives that can read the information stored on these ROMs, which are either music or data.