(1) For a chip's manufacturing process, see
process technology.
(2) To manipulate data in the computer. The computer is said to be processing no matter what action it is taking upon the data; whether the data are actually being updated in a database or just being displayed on screen.
In order to evaluate a computer system's performance, the time it takes to process data internally is often analyzed separately from the time it takes to get data in and out of the computer. The I/O (input/output) is usually much more time consuming than the processing. For an explanation of how the computer processes data in memory, where all processing takes place, see
computer and
3 C's.
(3) Software running in the computer. When a computer is booted, numerous processes are started by the operating system, while certain applications may also start their processes that continue to run in the background. In a Windows computer, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del launches the Task Manager, which displays all running processes. In the Mac, the Activity Monitor in the Applications/Utilities folder shows the processes. See
Windows processes.