A microprocessor is a silicon chip made up of thousand, millions of billions of transistors. A simple microprocessor will receive two pieces of data(into a register that stores the data) and perform a simple operation on the data. The processor will receive an instruction that tells it what operation to perform. Some of the instructions include adding the numbers, subtracting one from the other, adding one to the number, subtracting one. Then the result is stored in memory or the hard drive.
A recent example of a processor is the intel core 2 duo.

