Does it just affect the speed at which the computer runs? Like how fast it boots up / shuts down, how fast browser pages load, how fast it opens / closes applications, and how fast applications run (e.g. photoshop, Final Cut Pro, etc.)?
In: Technology
It does the computing.
As for what that means for your computer, most tasks aren’t actually intensive. A decent CPU will load and render web-pages pretty fast and run most apps fine. For web pages now, it takes a lot longer to download the page than for your CPU to interpret it (images, multiple download sources). For booting up and application startup the bigger deal is your hard drive read bandwidth and memory (RAM). Generally speaking, a whole chunk of code and data is loaded into RAM when you boot up or start an application, so a faster hard drive is going to make that process faster, whereas a faster CPU won’t normally help (unless the application is doing a lot of computing on start-up).
What your processor is actually doing at any given time is more interesting. It is constantly switching back and forth between all of your applications (threads) doing a little bit of execution on each. The instructions are loaded into RAM in machine code (x64 for most desktops/laptops), but a lot of your applications are actually interpreted to some degree, so the actual machine code being run is then simulating another virtual processor and loading text instructions from some script files to interpret. This is actually how all webpages work (JavaScript is downloaded from a server and then interpreted by your browser).
The CPU also connects to and controls pretty much everything else in the system at the hardware level. It controls your HDD/SSD, GPU, USB peripherals etc. using “driver” code.
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