It's the largish square thing tucked under an even larger heatsink. Without the heat sink you'd be looking at a thin, two inch square with plenty of golden pegs on the bottom and a little half inchish rectangle bit in the centre. That little centre bit is the processor. On a microscopic scale, if you could see it, it would look like a complex road map with millions of straight lined squiggles, stops and blocks. Like some sort of futuristic suburb.

(this isn't working for some odd reason)Are we on the backup server?

Here are some pictures of Intel's recent Core 2 Duo and the fourth one is of AMD's latest quad core PHENOM PROCESSOR. Here are somelinks. The first photograph a translucent (photoshoped) view of a CORE 2 DUO microprocessor inside of a package. The URL to tomshardware.com that I am providing shows the actual silicon chip in it's naked unpackaged form. http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/29/intel_penryn_4ghz_with_air_cooling/page5.html Just like cars made by GM or Ford, not all chips look alike, even from the same company. AMD's processors have a different appearance than Intel's. In the next link you will see what their latest PHENOM CPU looks like. http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/19/amd_phenom_athlon_64_x2/page4.html In this link you can see a CPU (Central Processing Unit) in it's packaged form but with out a metal heatspreader on top. The bottom has pins that allow it to be plugged in to a circuit board. Note the rectangular section on the top portion is the actual silicon that does the processing as seen in the tomshardware links above and the second link below. http://www.cpu-world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=48438 http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2007/10/intel_core_2_extreme_qx9650/die-comparison.jpg In the next link, it contains microscopic photographic dissections of processors. Many engineers would get creative with un-used space on the chips and leave hidden art on the unused portions. These whimsical creations added no functionality and were often snuck on to the silicon near the end of the engineering project. It was sort of like leaving graffiti or signature on something. Such "ART" on silicon is rare today but was common back in the 70-80's and a very few in the early 1990's. This art is belived to be much rarer today, because many company's started to crack down on their engineers for such art that occasional would cause manufacturing problems or in some cases premature failures. http://www.microscope.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html EDIT: Recent news- Intel's Centrino ATOM released. Die shots show a much different looking CPU than CORE 2 DUO. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3276

The actual processor is usually covered by a cooling fan/heat sink in a working computer. Processors, uninstalled, usually look like flat plastic squares with the bottom covered with copper pins that fit into the CPU socket of the motherboard.

mostly a square part. various sizes depending on chip. either ceramic, plastic, metal topped of the previous two, and either has on the bottom; metal pins(pin grid array/PGA){AMD athlon}, or has metal contact points(land grid array/LGA){coreduo/quad, or R-xxxxx NEC}, or little balls of metal(ball grid array/BGA){various embedded}, or the processor chip mounted on a printed circuit board connected to the motherboard with slot pins.(early athlons,pentium 2,pentium3, and early Celerons)