Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? It's time for a tech Stuff Tidbits episode
Speaker 1: and I thought today we could talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about CPUs and some of the stuff around them. So
Speaker 1: if you are someone who is you know, familiar with
Speaker 1: the term, but you don't know a whole lot about CPUs,
Speaker 1: this is kind of for you. For those of you
Speaker 1: all who have been over clocking your CPUs for years,
Speaker 1: this is going to be beyond basic. So that's just
Speaker 1: a warning for you. But if you want to come
Speaker 1: along for the ride, please do. I like your company. Okay,
Speaker 1: So CPU, what the heck is that? It is a
Speaker 1: central processing unit. You can think of this as the
Speaker 1: brains of your computer. This is the micro chip that
Speaker 1: will accept data. It'll actually send out and request data
Speaker 1: from memory for example, to be able to run operations
Speaker 1: on that data and create output. So you get input
Speaker 1: coming in, you get operations going on, like you know,
Speaker 1: mathematical operations, and then you get results coming out. Those
Speaker 1: results do stuff in the computer. It could be all
Speaker 1: sorts of things like it's it's literally all the things
Speaker 1: that need to happen. And if you think of the
Speaker 1: CPU kind of like a brain, it's not a one
Speaker 1: to one, don't take it like that, but it does
Speaker 1: a similar function. How everything our bodies are doing. Everything
Speaker 1: we are doing is ultimately coming as a result of
Speaker 1: brain activity. That you know, if you if you are
Speaker 1: thinking about it, then that's obviously active. You can understand that.
Speaker 1: But if it's stuff like you know, things that you're
Speaker 1: doing unconsciously, like linking, Like you're not thinking about blinking,
Speaker 1: are you? Please? Please don't think about blinking, because I
Speaker 1: don't want to be responsible for that. You're doing it. Now,
Speaker 1: you're going to think every time you blink for a while,
Speaker 1: and then you'll stop, you'll forget about it for a bit,
Speaker 1: then it'll come back to you later in the day
Speaker 1: and you'll start thinking about blinking again, and I'm that's
Speaker 1: all my fault anyway. CPUs are able to run processes
Speaker 1: on data. That's their main purpose. Now. They come in
Speaker 1: a couple of different varieties and from a couple of
Speaker 1: different manufacturers. The two major manufacturers of CPUs really the
Speaker 1: only two worth talking about when you get down to it,
Speaker 1: because the entire industry has centered around them. Are Intel
Speaker 1: and AMD, and these two companies dominate the CPU industry,
Speaker 1: and in fact the CPUs they make are incompatible with
Speaker 1: one another. Right, you can't swap an Intel chip out
Speaker 1: for an AMD chip on your computer because an Intel
Speaker 1: chip won't fit in an AMD slot and vice versa.
Speaker 1: So this also gives me a chance to mention motherboards,
Speaker 1: which I'll just do briefly. Motherboards are giant circuit boards. Essentially,
Speaker 1: this is like your peripheral nervous system in a way.
Speaker 1: This is what connects all the components to each other
Speaker 1: so that data can actually pass from one thing to
Speaker 1: another and your computer it can work. So you can
Speaker 1: think of this a sort of the vertebrae attaches everything together,
Speaker 1: and motherboards work with specific chips. So if you are
Speaker 1: ever going to build your own computer, then one thing
Speaker 1: you absolutely must make certain you do is to confirm
Speaker 1: that the processor you're interested in will work with the
Speaker 1: mother board you're interested in. If you're getting an AMD motherboard,
Speaker 1: like an AMD compatible motherboard, and you're getting an Intel chip,
Speaker 1: you're going to rapidly find out that you've you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to return something because either you're gonna need to
Speaker 1: get an AMD processor or you're going to get another motherboard.
Speaker 1: But motherboards are where you plug everything else in, right,
Speaker 1: Like if you've got a graphics processing unit, which we'll
Speaker 1: talk about in a second, or you know you've got
Speaker 1: various components that you want to add to it. Maybe
Speaker 1: you've got other expansion slots that you want to fill
Speaker 1: up with various cards of some sort, maybe a capture
Speaker 1: card something like that, that goes on to the motherboard,
Speaker 1: which again acts as kind of like the connectivity for
Speaker 1: all the different elements in your PC. Getting back to CPUs,
Speaker 1: because there are a couple of other things I want
Speaker 1: to talk about. I did mention that there are a
Speaker 1: couple of different types of CPU. Actually there's lots if
Speaker 1: you want to boil down to it. But really one
Speaker 1: thing we can talk about our cores, like a single
Speaker 1: core CPU versus a multi core CPU. For many years,
Speaker 1: single core was pretty much all you had, and you
Speaker 1: could increase the speed of how your CPU could process
Speaker 1: information by getting CPUs that had more and more components
Speaker 1: crammed onto them. But that was pretty much the only
Speaker 1: way you could speed things up. Then we get to
Speaker 1: multi core CPU design, and as the name suggests, these
Speaker 1: CPUs actually consists of kind of like miniature versions of
Speaker 1: CPUs all clumped together in a way. So think of
Speaker 1: it instead of it being one big brain, something like
Speaker 1: maybe for smaller brains or AID or whatever. However many
Speaker 1: cores there are. Multi core CPUs are effective when they're
Speaker 1: dealing with information that can be broken down into parallel
Speaker 1: lines of processing because you can assign different cores by you.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is all happening by the computer. You're
Speaker 1: not taking an active role, but the computer can assign
Speaker 1: different lines of processing to specif it cores, and that way,
Speaker 1: each core is focusing on part of the overall operation,
Speaker 1: and collectively they can solve it faster. So if you've
Speaker 1: listened to tex staff for a very long time, you
Speaker 1: know the analogy I'm about to give because it's one
Speaker 1: of my favorite go toos. Imagine that it's a class
Speaker 1: of math students and everyone in the class is great
Speaker 1: at math, but there's also one absolute genius at math
Speaker 1: who just consistently finishes tests fast and is perfect, and
Speaker 1: she's just the best. Everybody else is great, and they
Speaker 1: also get very good grades, but it takes them more
Speaker 1: time to complete, say a math test. And so as
Speaker 1: a fun experiment, the teacher assigns a pop quiz to
Speaker 1: the class, and the genius student she has all the
Speaker 1: problems on her sheet. She has to answer all of them.
Speaker 1: Let's say that there's six of them, and there are
Speaker 1: six other students. They're really smart ones, but they're not
Speaker 1: genius level. They're each given one of the problem. So
Speaker 1: student one gets problem one, student two gets problem two,
Speaker 1: and so on. They just have to solve their own problem.
Speaker 1: That's it, and then they can turn in their test.
Speaker 1: So the question is who finishes the test first. Well,
Speaker 1: in this approach, it's probably going to be the six students, right,
Speaker 1: because they're each focusing on just one problem. Whereas the genius,
Speaker 1: even though she's faster than any individual student, she has
Speaker 1: to complete all six and she can't do it simultaneously.
Speaker 1: She has to go sequentially. Well, that would be a
Speaker 1: case where the six students would outperform the single one,
Speaker 1: where you could say a multi core processor could handle
Speaker 1: that sort of computational problem more effectively than a single core.
Speaker 1: But that's not how all computer problems come, right, Like
Speaker 1: what if the test worked in such a way where
Speaker 1: the only way you could tackle problem number two is
Speaker 1: if you had the solution to problem number one first,
Speaker 1: then you could tackle problem number two. Same thing with
Speaker 1: problem number three. You have to wait until you have
Speaker 1: the solution to problem number two. Well, then the six
Speaker 1: students are going to lose because we've already established the genius.
Speaker 1: She can finish her test much faster, and meanwhile, student
Speaker 1: number two has to wait until student number one is
Speaker 1: finished before they can tackle problem number two. Right, So,
Speaker 1: depending on the computational problem, multicore may or may not
Speaker 1: be better than a single core. For a lot of
Speaker 1: gaming applications, multi coore can work pretty well, and also
Speaker 1: in a lot of graphics processing units or GPUs, which,
Speaker 1: as the name suggests, are all about handling the processing
Speaker 1: to generate graphics. Those are often parallel processing machines. Right,
Speaker 1: that's just like a chip designed to do parallel processing
Speaker 1: and coincidentally, or not even so coincidentally, but because of that,
Speaker 1: they also were incredibly important for mining of certain crypto currencies,
Speaker 1: initially stuff like bitcoin, but then bitcoin's value got to
Speaker 1: a point where it no longer made financial sense to
Speaker 1: go after graphics processing cards in order to mine bitcoin,
Speaker 1: because you just you would fall behind. People were going
Speaker 1: for purpose built machines in order to mind bitcoin more effectively.
Speaker 1: But then ethereum before it moved on to being a
Speaker 1: proof of steak versus proof of work. That was the
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency that drove people to scoop up as many graphics
Speaker 1: processing unit cards as they possibly could in order to
Speaker 1: create an entire network of computers using these to mine cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: because like graphics processing, cryptocurrency mining really would benefit from
Speaker 1: parallel processing, which is what multicore processors can do. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's your basic division, single core and multicore. There's
Speaker 1: some other stuff we need to talk about. One of
Speaker 1: the things is clock speed. So this can seem a
Speaker 1: little confusing at first because you're thinking, well, our experience
Speaker 1: with clocks is that these are devices meant to keep time,
Speaker 1: and therefore the speed of clocks should be uniform, it
Speaker 1: should be universal, right, because you just want to keep time.
Speaker 1: That's not what we're really talking about here. Clock speed
Speaker 1: with CPUs or even GPUs, it's the rate at which
Speaker 1: the processor is able to perform calculations, and we typically
Speaker 1: see this measured these days, especially in gigga hurts. Like
Speaker 1: when I remember from my days of working with computers
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, kill hurts and mega hurts
Speaker 1: were like that was the thing. But gigga hurts is
Speaker 1: definitely where we're at now, and hurts refers to a
Speaker 1: repetitive task in a given amount of time, like how
Speaker 1: many times are you doing something within a given amount
Speaker 1: of time like a second, So one hurts would be
Speaker 1: one repetition per second. When you're talking about gigga hurts,
Speaker 1: you're talking about a billion per second. So when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a clock speed of a processor and it's
Speaker 1: three point five gigga hurts, that means it's three point
Speaker 1: five billion operations per second. I'm going to explain that
Speaker 1: a little bit further because that's kind of a very
Speaker 1: high level version of what clock speed is. But before
Speaker 1: we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I mentioned before that clock speed reference is essentially
Speaker 1: the number of calculations or operations that a CPU can
Speaker 1: make in a given amount of time. In this case
Speaker 1: a second, operations can be actually multi step, so really
Speaker 1: you should think of this as steps that the processor
Speaker 1: can take per second. With some operations requiring only a
Speaker 1: single step, in some perhaps requiring multiple steps. So it
Speaker 1: gets a little more fuzzy when we start talking about operations.
Speaker 1: But generally speaking, the higher the clock speed, the faster
Speaker 1: that processor is at you know, processing information. It can
Speaker 1: process more information in the same amount of time, which
Speaker 1: we end up saying means the processor is faster even
Speaker 1: though you know most of the time it's not moving anywhere,
Speaker 1: at least not if your computer has been set up properly.
Speaker 1: So this also brings us to the concept of overclocking.
Speaker 1: Overclocking is when you end up pushing past the rated
Speaker 1: specifications of a piece of hardware in order to get
Speaker 1: more out of it. So, in other words, when you
Speaker 1: get a processor, it essentially is, you know, it's telling
Speaker 1: you what clock speed it's been set at. That speed
Speaker 1: has been determined by the manufacturer. Usually you can actually
Speaker 1: push a processor to go beyond that speed. You have
Speaker 1: to go into some settings to be able to do this.
Speaker 1: It gets very technical. I'll probably do an episode just
Speaker 1: about that at some point, but for now we'll set
Speaker 1: it aside. The point being is you can go in
Speaker 1: there and essentially remove the regulator that would otherwise keep
Speaker 1: you at that top speed and not let you go
Speaker 1: past it. You can take that down and allow your
Speaker 1: processor to work even harder. This is gonna do a
Speaker 1: couple of things. It's going to generate a lot more heat,
Speaker 1: so you have to have a way of dealing with
Speaker 1: that heat otherwise you run the risk of damaging the processor.
Speaker 1: And then sure it will run super fast for a while,
Speaker 1: but then ultimately it's going to break, it's going to
Speaker 1: wear out, and then you'll have to replace it. So
Speaker 1: you really need to have a way of carrying heat
Speaker 1: away to allow this to happen. And then like there's
Speaker 1: certain limits you just are not going to get past
Speaker 1: without damaging the processor. So overclocking is a thing that
Speaker 1: is possible, and a lot of people do it, and
Speaker 1: a lot of gamers do it in particular because it
Speaker 1: allows them to get even more performance out of their machines.
Speaker 1: But you need to know what you're doing so that
Speaker 1: you do it in a way that's not gonna wreck
Speaker 1: your computer rail of the gate and have to you'll
Speaker 1: have to go in and like maybe replace a CPU,
Speaker 1: or if you're really unlucky, you might have to replace
Speaker 1: a whole motherboard along with the CPU. So that's something
Speaker 1: to keep in mind. But yeah, overclocking is a way
Speaker 1: to get your computer to do more than what the
Speaker 1: manufacturer intended. Now, in some cases, in fact, this has
Speaker 1: happened in the past. Manufacturers have made processors like the
Speaker 1: same processor chip and specifically gone in and set different
Speaker 1: versions of that chip with different limitations of its clock speed. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, there's an artificial limit, like an artificial ceiling,
Speaker 1: to how fast that processor can work. You could go
Speaker 1: out and buy one version of the CPU that's maybe
Speaker 1: limited to one point five giga hurts, and then you
Speaker 1: go and you get to another one it's one point
Speaker 1: seven five, and then a third one and it's two
Speaker 1: point zero. And it's possible that all three of those
Speaker 1: processors are from an architecture standpoint identical. The only thing
Speaker 1: that's different is that the manufacturer has put a different
Speaker 1: limit in there and set a different price tag on
Speaker 1: each of those chips, and it makes it really cheap
Speaker 1: to produce them, and you're just artificially limiting what the
Speaker 1: hardware can do. So there are ways of getting past that.
Speaker 1: And I know that there are a lot of computer
Speaker 1: enthusiasts out there and when they find out that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. They get really upset, which is understandable because
Speaker 1: you're thinking to yourself, if this device is capable of
Speaker 1: performing at a higher level that's still within the rate
Speaker 1: limit of the manufacturer for the you know, whatever the
Speaker 1: top of the line is, then it's so unfair that's
Speaker 1: being sold to me with brakes put on so it
Speaker 1: cannot reach that level. I'm going to remove the brakes.
Speaker 1: That has happened in the past. It's not something that
Speaker 1: necessarily happens frequently, but it does happen. But then there
Speaker 1: are also cases where someone just goes out and they
Speaker 1: buy a really fast CPU and they say, I want
Speaker 1: to make it more faster. Then they'll go in and
Speaker 1: overclock it. Overclockers often will experiment with other pretty wild
Speaker 1: stuff like liquid nitrogen cooling and that kind of thing
Speaker 1: in order to get the absolute most out of the
Speaker 1: performance of their machines. But then you're starting to talk
Speaker 1: about setups that are truly crazy, and you're not likely
Speaker 1: to encounter those things. One other thing I want to
Speaker 1: talk about with CPUs or processors in general, are flops.
Speaker 1: Now not talking about products that and do well in
Speaker 1: the market. I'm talking about floating point operations per second
Speaker 1: or flops. You'll often hear flops being thrown around as
Speaker 1: a measure of computational performance, and you know we have
Speaker 1: the clock speed is one version of this, well, flops
Speaker 1: is something similar. It's the number of floating point operations
Speaker 1: that the processor is able to handle per second. And
Speaker 1: this is a place where GPUs or graphics processing units
Speaker 1: often can outperform CPUs, So we look at flops. That's
Speaker 1: another way really of just measuring how powerful or fast
Speaker 1: a processor is. When we look at things like supercomputers,
Speaker 1: we are often referencing their processing power in terms of
Speaker 1: the number of flops like peda flops. You're talking about
Speaker 1: astronomical numbers here when you're talking about floating point operations
Speaker 1: per second. But it's just really another way of judging
Speaker 1: the processing speed of a processor. And as I said,
Speaker 1: it's more frequently something that we associate with GPUs than CPUs,
Speaker 1: but it is an important thing to keep in mind.
Speaker 1: So those are some real basic elements of CPUs. Again,
Speaker 1: you can go into so much more detailed that I
Speaker 1: thought that this would be a way to understand from
Speaker 1: a very high level what CPUs are doing and why
Speaker 1: they're important we can talk about other things in the future,
Speaker 1: like hyper threading, for example, to talk about how that
Speaker 1: plays into say a multi core processor. But I figured
Speaker 1: that would go a little beyond just a tech Stuff
Speaker 1: Tidbits episode. I'll probably do more of these in the future,
Speaker 1: where I'll look at things like memory and other elements
Speaker 1: in computers that are basic but often hard to understand
Speaker 1: from for a newcomer, someone who has maybe heard the
Speaker 1: term but they don't really understand what it means or
Speaker 1: how it fits into the overall picture of technology. And
Speaker 1: we'll do it beyond computers as well. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: other types of technology and have these little tidbit episodes occasionally.
Speaker 1: I hope you are all well. If you would like
Speaker 1: to reach out to me, the best way to do
Speaker 1: that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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