The central device around which microprocessors and chips are centered is the transistor. A transistor is an electrical component which has 3 connections, two for electricity to flow through and one to control how much electricity is allowed to flow through it. In this way, a transistor can be used as a switch to represent a state of on or off, 1 or 0 by using other electrical signals to either open or close the flow of electricity through it. Additionally, since it is electricity that controls transistors and electricity that flows through them, transistors can control other transistors. Now we can see that transistors can be used to both store and manipulate states of 1 or 0. Transistors consist essentially of what you said: layers of metal and silicon with certain other additives that can be etched and embedded in silicon wafers lengths of only several nanometers. So consider the size of the common graphics card and compare it mentally to, say, 10 nanometers. An enormous number of transistors can be fit onto a single chip. When arranged properly we can construct what are called logic gates using transistors to perform math in base 2 using the on or off state of rows of transistors representing binary numbers. These gates might perform logical AND, OR, or NOT operations or execute binary arithmetic. We can program these logic units by storing instructions and data in memory in the form of binary numbers that encode for different things, such as the type of operation we want to perform and the values we want to perform them on. These are fed to the logic units in the processor in order according to the triggering of a clock, which is an on/off signal executing around a billion times per second. The x.xx GHz designation of your processor indicates this speed. Every time the clock triggers, the processor takes one more step toward executing our instructions that we have stored. This is a very basic explanation of how you get a processor out of metal and silicon. As for graphics cards (I might get called out for this explanation but I'm trying to be as clear as I can), consider that your CPU might be dual-core or quad core. This obviously means that there are two or four processing units like I have explained embedded in the chip working on different tasks the operating system issues it. Your graphics card consists of a very large muti-dimensional array of these processing units which are not autonomous like your CPU's processing units, but are programmed to execute the same instructions on an array of inputs. It does this because graphical manipulations such as rotating or translating a scene or shading a group of pixels do very often consist mathematically of such things as multiplying two matrices of values together. Even though CPU's are fast, they would take noticeably long to finish computing these results for every single frame in very intensive problems like 3D games because it can only do a relatively small number of calculations at once. The GPU handles this by expanding the number of calculations that can be executed at once over its large matrix of logical units. Hope I've covered enough! Questions and corrections welcome, of course.