So I guess I'll use some analogies here to help explain what my concept of how the processor chips operates and etc...

Okay here's how I think the CPU Processor chip works using analogies ....

I always pictured the CPU processor operating with stacking data and making processed something like the rules of the card game, Free Cell.

You have the empty slots which is RAM or virtual memory and you have 52 cards stacked up as the processes or data needed to be processed.

For each time the clock chip pulses is when someone get's a new card into the home slots and after winning the game is when 52 new cards come into play.

Now I know this happens a lot faster depending on how many MHz your clock processor can pulsate in seconds but that's what my concept of how a CPU processor chip operates.

I know the data is measures in base two or binary language due to the off/on nature of the circuits, which is controlled by logical gates..

The problem is I know very little about boolean algebra like AND X(exclusive)OR, but I think it goes if you were to create a very basic circuit with the AND and XOR gates who's purpose is to light up a light bulb, AND means both negative and positive has to be on to make the light bulb light up and XOR is either/all ... ? Does that sound right ?

So with my first analogy am I on the right path or should I go back and start over again learning about how the CPU processor chip processes data ?

Yeah there's a chance I might beat myself up if I just made a fool out of myself because I'll be disappointed that I wasn't as smart as I though I was and that the few people who actually told me I was smart had lied to me ....

For most IT careers you don't need to know how a CPU works. I have no idea, for example, and I've worked in a few different IT roles over the past 28 years.

On the other hand, it can be interesting if you have an interest in computer hardware.

This kind of stuff does interest me but I have to share it with my other obsessions and right now I'm in tech mode which means I'll be obsessing over ROM hacking and computers until I return to my artistic interests, like music and etc ... :/

Will you accept a provisional answer of "electricity?"

Fetch, Decode, Execute cycle:

1 - Fetch instruction from memory (ignore cache layers and so on for the sake of simplicity)
2 - Decode instruction (usually done using a circuit cunningly named a "decoder" - often a huge array of AND and NOT gates, or just a big pile of NANDs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoder )
3 - Execute - the pulse coming out of the decoder switches on the right circuit to do what needs to be done


In modern CPUs, the above cycle is implemented by microcode - essentially a program embedded in the CPU written in a very specific language by the manufacturer - microcode deals with "connect wire A to point X" rather than "add values from memory locations A and B", and the clock pulses actually make the CPU run the microcode - so a single machine code instruction can last for several clock cycles.

As for boolean, it's quite simple, boolean logic gates output either a 1 or a 0 (true or false, high or low) depending on their inputs:

AND -  2 or more inputs, all inputs have to be high/1/on (different people use different terms - i'll just say "high")
NAND - 2 or more inputs, all inputs have to be low (i.e zero/off)
NOT - 1 input, must be low
OR - 2 or more inputs, at least one of them needs to be high
XOR - 2 inputs, 1 of them needs to be high and the other low

Thank you for the Wikipedia article and the brief explanation of Boolean algebra but I do have a question though...

You say with AND all inputs have to high or on does that have anything to do the binary 11 ? like NAND = 00 NOT = 01 10 100 101 110 1000 1001 1010 1100 1101 1110 and XOR =  any binary except 111 and 1111 ?

Boolean logic gates often have their inputs represented in binary, yes.
high/1/on/true/ all mean the same thing
low/0/off/false likewise all mean the same thing

You can represent the inputs as just bits, so feeding 11 into an AND gate gives out 1, lookup "Truth table" on wikipedia

So would there be a combination of Boolean operations that can represent every binary ?