All arithmetical and logical operations inside a computer/server configuration are handled by its Central Processing Unit, or CPU. This hardware element is sometimes called the "brains" of the personal computer too. The pace at which the CPU carries out system instructions is commonly referred to as its speed and it's measured in Hertz. The speedier the processing unit is, the quicker scripts and web applications will be executed, even though the overall performance of the latter is determined by other things also - the read/write speed of the hard drive, the amount of physical memory, the network connectivity, and so on. All modern CPUs have numerous cores, which work together. Subsequently, the effectiveness and the workload a CPU can handle increase, as every single core can process different tasks individually and numerous cores can handle 1 task that cannot be processed by a single core.