CPU

1. What is the function of the CPU?
central processing unit -- is a complete computation engine that is fabricated on a single chip.

2. What was the name of the first CPU?
A microprocessor

3. Referring to the graph on page 2 of the article, describe how the speed of CPU’s has changed.
The speed of the CPU has changed and increasingly faster. The Pentium 4 can execute any piece of code that ran on the original 8088, but it does it about 5,000 times faster! The first produced microprocessor was the intel 8080 which has an MIPS of 0.64and data widths of 8 bits. the latest one is the Pentium 4 "Prescott" which has now 32 bits64-bit bus and ~7,000.
4. What does MIPS measure?

MIPS stands for "millions of instructions per second" and is a rough measure of the performance of a CPU.