The Neural Net CPU is a "learning computer" and one of the most powerful microprocessors ever built. All of the battle units deployed by Skynet contain a Neural Net CPU.

Housed within inertial shock dampers within each battle unit, the CPU gives Skynet the ability to control its units directly, or allow them to function by themselves, learning from a pre-programmed knowledge base as they go. This means that each battle unit has the potential to adapt to its situation, and literally reason through problems and tactical maneuvers. In the case of the various Terminator series, this means that they can learn to behave more like humans in order to be better equipped for infiltration. When delegated by Skynet for autonomous tasks, the unit in question is place under a "read-only" preset; this means that they cannot adapt beyond the needs of their assigned mission nor go beyond what their mission parameters allow. Properly removing the microprocessor would result in the shut-down of the particular unit it belonged to, making it the "soul" of the unit.

It is developed by Miles Bennett Dyson, director of Special Projects at Cyberdyne Systems Corporation, via reverse engineering on the wreckage of a T-800 Terminator in 1984.

The CPU was modeled and designed primarily on computers in advanced 3-Dimensional programming packages, where simulated testing could be done in real time, or at increased rates.

The lattice of cubes in the construction of the prototype CPU suggests a "hypercube", a cube of more than three dimensions. In computer design, hypercubes are used as a physical connection scheme that minimizes the effective communication distance (and therefore the time delay) between processors, when the logical connection scheme needed by the software that will be run on those processors cannot be known in advance. This then supports the Neural Net's ability to learn, adapt, and built new logical connection schemes.

The Neural Net CPU is ground-breaking, using the very latest in Quantum Effects chips. Until Dyson designed the CPU, computers were powered by chips composed of millions of transistors. Computing in the old way was done in the binary system - 1's and 0's, on's and off's. With the QE brain in which many more computations can be done each second, quadrillions of switching positions are possible, many of them simultaneous at each quantum level. All this happens down around the Planck length (theoretically, the smallest measurement possible) - so infinitesimally small that superstrings are the major league players. Superstrings are strange, 10-dimensional building blocks that are more than one-thousand to one-billion times smaller than a single proton in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.