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TechStuff Tidbits: CPU Basics

Published Apr 12, 2023, 5:25 PM

What does a CPU do? What is clock speed? What does it mean to overclock a CPU? And are FLOPS a good thing?

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? It's time for a tech Stuff Tidbits episode and I thought today we could talk a little bit about CPUs and some of the stuff around them. So if you are someone who is you know, familiar with the term, but you don't know a whole lot about CPUs, this is kind of for you. For those of you all who have been over clocking your CPUs for years, this is going to be beyond basic. So that's just a warning for you. But if you want to come along for the ride, please do. I like your company. Okay, So CPU, what the heck is that? It is a central processing unit. You can think of this as the brains of your computer. This is the micro chip that will accept data. It'll actually send out and request data from memory for example, to be able to run operations on that data and create output. So you get input coming in, you get operations going on, like you know, mathematical operations, and then you get results coming out. Those results do stuff in the computer. It could be all sorts of things like it's it's literally all the things that need to happen. And if you think of the CPU kind of like a brain, it's not a one to one, don't take it like that, but it does a similar function. How everything our bodies are doing. Everything we are doing is ultimately coming as a result of brain activity. That you know, if you if you are thinking about it, then that's obviously active. You can understand that. But if it's stuff like you know, things that you're doing unconsciously, like linking, Like you're not thinking about blinking, are you? Please? Please don't think about blinking, because I don't want to be responsible for that. You're doing it. Now, you're going to think every time you blink for a while, and then you'll stop, you'll forget about it for a bit, then it'll come back to you later in the day and you'll start thinking about blinking again, and I'm that's all my fault anyway. CPUs are able to run processes on data. That's their main purpose. Now. They come in a couple of different varieties and from a couple of different manufacturers. The two major manufacturers of CPUs really the only two worth talking about when you get down to it, because the entire industry has centered around them. Are Intel and AMD, and these two companies dominate the CPU industry, and in fact the CPUs they make are incompatible with one another. Right, you can't swap an Intel chip out for an AMD chip on your computer because an Intel chip won't fit in an AMD slot and vice versa. So this also gives me a chance to mention motherboards, which I'll just do briefly. Motherboards are giant circuit boards. Essentially, this is like your peripheral nervous system in a way. This is what connects all the components to each other so that data can actually pass from one thing to another and your computer it can work. So you can think of this a sort of the vertebrae attaches everything together, and motherboards work with specific chips. So if you are ever going to build your own computer, then one thing you absolutely must make certain you do is to confirm that the processor you're interested in will work with the mother board you're interested in. If you're getting an AMD motherboard, like an AMD compatible motherboard, and you're getting an Intel chip, you're going to rapidly find out that you've you're gonna have to return something because either you're gonna need to get an AMD processor or you're going to get another motherboard. But motherboards are where you plug everything else in, right, Like if you've got a graphics processing unit, which we'll talk about in a second, or you know you've got various components that you want to add to it. Maybe you've got other expansion slots that you want to fill up with various cards of some sort, maybe a capture card something like that, that goes on to the motherboard, which again acts as kind of like the connectivity for all the different elements in your PC. Getting back to CPUs, because there are a couple of other things I want to talk about. I did mention that there are a couple of different types of CPU. Actually there's lots if you want to boil down to it. But really one thing we can talk about our cores, like a single core CPU versus a multi core CPU. For many years, single core was pretty much all you had, and you could increase the speed of how your CPU could process information by getting CPUs that had more and more components crammed onto them. But that was pretty much the only way you could speed things up. Then we get to multi core CPU design, and as the name suggests, these CPUs actually consists of kind of like miniature versions of CPUs all clumped together in a way. So think of it instead of it being one big brain, something like maybe for smaller brains or AID or whatever. However many cores there are. Multi core CPUs are effective when they're dealing with information that can be broken down into parallel lines of processing because you can assign different cores by you. I mean, this is all happening by the computer. You're not taking an active role, but the computer can assign different lines of processing to specif it cores, and that way, each core is focusing on part of the overall operation, and collectively they can solve it faster. So if you've listened to tex staff for a very long time, you know the analogy I'm about to give because it's one of my favorite go toos. Imagine that it's a class of math students and everyone in the class is great at math, but there's also one absolute genius at math who just consistently finishes tests fast and is perfect, and she's just the best. Everybody else is great, and they also get very good grades, but it takes them more time to complete, say a math test. And so as a fun experiment, the teacher assigns a pop quiz to the class, and the genius student she has all the problems on her sheet. She has to answer all of them. Let's say that there's six of them, and there are six other students. They're really smart ones, but they're not genius level. They're each given one of the problem. So student one gets problem one, student two gets problem two, and so on. They just have to solve their own problem. That's it, and then they can turn in their test. So the question is who finishes the test first. Well, in this approach, it's probably going to be the six students, right, because they're each focusing on just one problem. Whereas the genius, even though she's faster than any individual student, she has to complete all six and she can't do it simultaneously. She has to go sequentially. Well, that would be a case where the six students would outperform the single one, where you could say a multi core processor could handle that sort of computational problem more effectively than a single core. But that's not how all computer problems come, right, Like what if the test worked in such a way where the only way you could tackle problem number two is if you had the solution to problem number one first, then you could tackle problem number two. Same thing with problem number three. You have to wait until you have the solution to problem number two. Well, then the six students are going to lose because we've already established the genius. She can finish her test much faster, and meanwhile, student number two has to wait until student number one is finished before they can tackle problem number two. Right, So, depending on the computational problem, multicore may or may not be better than a single core. For a lot of gaming applications, multi coore can work pretty well, and also in a lot of graphics processing units or GPUs, which, as the name suggests, are all about handling the processing to generate graphics. Those are often parallel processing machines. Right, that's just like a chip designed to do parallel processing and coincidentally, or not even so coincidentally, but because of that, they also were incredibly important for mining of certain crypto currencies, initially stuff like bitcoin, but then bitcoin's value got to a point where it no longer made financial sense to go after graphics processing cards in order to mine bitcoin, because you just you would fall behind. People were going for purpose built machines in order to mind bitcoin more effectively. But then ethereum before it moved on to being a proof of steak versus proof of work. That was the cryptocurrency that drove people to scoop up as many graphics processing unit cards as they possibly could in order to create an entire network of computers using these to mine cryptocurrency, because like graphics processing, cryptocurrency mining really would benefit from parallel processing, which is what multicore processors can do. Okay, so that's your basic division, single core and multicore. There's some other stuff we need to talk about. One of the things is clock speed. So this can seem a little confusing at first because you're thinking, well, our experience with clocks is that these are devices meant to keep time, and therefore the speed of clocks should be uniform, it should be universal, right, because you just want to keep time. That's not what we're really talking about here. Clock speed with CPUs or even GPUs, it's the rate at which the processor is able to perform calculations, and we typically see this measured these days, especially in gigga hurts. Like when I remember from my days of working with computers when I was a kid, kill hurts and mega hurts were like that was the thing. But gigga hurts is definitely where we're at now, and hurts refers to a repetitive task in a given amount of time, like how many times are you doing something within a given amount of time like a second, So one hurts would be one repetition per second. When you're talking about gigga hurts, you're talking about a billion per second. So when you're talking about a clock speed of a processor and it's three point five gigga hurts, that means it's three point five billion operations per second. I'm going to explain that a little bit further because that's kind of a very high level version of what clock speed is. But before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay, So I mentioned before that clock speed reference is essentially the number of calculations or operations that a CPU can make in a given amount of time. In this case a second, operations can be actually multi step, so really you should think of this as steps that the processor can take per second. With some operations requiring only a single step, in some perhaps requiring multiple steps. So it gets a little more fuzzy when we start talking about operations. But generally speaking, the higher the clock speed, the faster that processor is at you know, processing information. It can process more information in the same amount of time, which we end up saying means the processor is faster even though you know most of the time it's not moving anywhere, at least not if your computer has been set up properly. So this also brings us to the concept of overclocking. Overclocking is when you end up pushing past the rated specifications of a piece of hardware in order to get more out of it. So, in other words, when you get a processor, it essentially is, you know, it's telling you what clock speed it's been set at. That speed has been determined by the manufacturer. Usually you can actually push a processor to go beyond that speed. You have to go into some settings to be able to do this. It gets very technical. I'll probably do an episode just about that at some point, but for now we'll set it aside. The point being is you can go in there and essentially remove the regulator that would otherwise keep you at that top speed and not let you go past it. You can take that down and allow your processor to work even harder. This is gonna do a couple of things. It's going to generate a lot more heat, so you have to have a way of dealing with that heat otherwise you run the risk of damaging the processor. And then sure it will run super fast for a while, but then ultimately it's going to break, it's going to wear out, and then you'll have to replace it. So you really need to have a way of carrying heat away to allow this to happen. And then like there's certain limits you just are not going to get past without damaging the processor. So overclocking is a thing that is possible, and a lot of people do it, and a lot of gamers do it in particular because it allows them to get even more performance out of their machines. But you need to know what you're doing so that you do it in a way that's not gonna wreck your computer rail of the gate and have to you'll have to go in and like maybe replace a CPU, or if you're really unlucky, you might have to replace a whole motherboard along with the CPU. So that's something to keep in mind. But yeah, overclocking is a way to get your computer to do more than what the manufacturer intended. Now, in some cases, in fact, this has happened in the past. Manufacturers have made processors like the same processor chip and specifically gone in and set different versions of that chip with different limitations of its clock speed. So, in other words, there's an artificial limit, like an artificial ceiling, to how fast that processor can work. You could go out and buy one version of the CPU that's maybe limited to one point five giga hurts, and then you go and you get to another one it's one point seven five, and then a third one and it's two point zero. And it's possible that all three of those processors are from an architecture standpoint identical. The only thing that's different is that the manufacturer has put a different limit in there and set a different price tag on each of those chips, and it makes it really cheap to produce them, and you're just artificially limiting what the hardware can do. So there are ways of getting past that. And I know that there are a lot of computer enthusiasts out there and when they find out that kind of thing. They get really upset, which is understandable because you're thinking to yourself, if this device is capable of performing at a higher level that's still within the rate limit of the manufacturer for the you know, whatever the top of the line is, then it's so unfair that's being sold to me with brakes put on so it cannot reach that level. I'm going to remove the brakes. That has happened in the past. It's not something that necessarily happens frequently, but it does happen. But then there are also cases where someone just goes out and they buy a really fast CPU and they say, I want to make it more faster. Then they'll go in and overclock it. Overclockers often will experiment with other pretty wild stuff like liquid nitrogen cooling and that kind of thing in order to get the absolute most out of the performance of their machines. But then you're starting to talk about setups that are truly crazy, and you're not likely to encounter those things. One other thing I want to talk about with CPUs or processors in general, are flops. Now not talking about products that and do well in the market. I'm talking about floating point operations per second or flops. You'll often hear flops being thrown around as a measure of computational performance, and you know we have the clock speed is one version of this, well, flops is something similar. It's the number of floating point operations that the processor is able to handle per second. And this is a place where GPUs or graphics processing units often can outperform CPUs, So we look at flops. That's another way really of just measuring how powerful or fast a processor is. When we look at things like supercomputers, we are often referencing their processing power in terms of the number of flops like peda flops. You're talking about astronomical numbers here when you're talking about floating point operations per second. But it's just really another way of judging the processing speed of a processor. And as I said, it's more frequently something that we associate with GPUs than CPUs, but it is an important thing to keep in mind. So those are some real basic elements of CPUs. Again, you can go into so much more detailed that I thought that this would be a way to understand from a very high level what CPUs are doing and why they're important we can talk about other things in the future, like hyper threading, for example, to talk about how that plays into say a multi core processor. But I figured that would go a little beyond just a tech Stuff Tidbits episode. I'll probably do more of these in the future, where I'll look at things like memory and other elements in computers that are basic but often hard to understand from for a newcomer, someone who has maybe heard the term but they don't really understand what it means or how it fits into the overall picture of technology. And we'll do it beyond computers as well. We'll talk about other types of technology and have these little tidbit episodes occasionally. I hope you are all well. If you would like to reach out to me, the best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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