The Core of Configuration In the movies, when the heroine wakes up with amnesia, she puts a hand to her brow and breathes, “Where am I?” When you push your PC’s power switch each morning, the machine not only has amnesia but needs to ask, “What am I?” — for that first millisecond, it doesn’t Read more…
An Introduction to Registers, Caches, Buses, and Chipsets It doesn’t matter if a CPU runs at 300MHz or 3.0GHz — if it isn’t given any data to process, it’s as useless as a printer waiting for you to refill the paper tray. That’s why, while it may be the brains of the operation, the processor Read more…
Why the Fastest RAM Isn’t Always the Best Match for Your CPU Every few months, fashion magazines tell women that their clothes are hopelessly out of style. Almost as often, computer magazines and enthusiast sites tell PC owners the same is true of their system memory. But as last month’s study of the CPU/memory interface Read more…
Why Some Systems Work Better Than Others If the CPU is the brain of a personal computer, the motherboard is its nervous system — the foundation or platform that supports and provides the data-transfer connections between the processor, memory, AGP and PCI expansion cards, disk drives, and external peripherals. And next to the CPU, the Read more…
Running Fast, Keeping Cool PC buffs who are always hungry for the fastest systems and latest gadgets are often called “power users.” But PC processors are literally power users — and their appetite for electric power not only challenges the creators of unplugged notebook computers, but affects desktop design as well. CPUs’ core voltages, heat Read more…
New Choices for Workstations and Servers Despite the rapid advance of processor performance, there are times when one CPU just isn’t enough. That’s when businesses — and increasingly individual users — are doubling or even quadrupling their computing power by opting for multiprocessor systems. For years, big companies have relied on multiprocessing for server applications Read more…
In August 2001, AMD declared war on the “megahertz myth” — declaring that for PC users, “the ultimate benefit of processor performance” is not a CPU’s clock speed in megahertz or gigahertz, but “how fast their applications run.” This white paper by Jay Pickett set the foundation (or threw down the gauntlet) for the model Read more…
Tag-Team Processing Offers Supercomputing on a Shoestring Sometimes one processor, not matter how powerful, just isn’t enough. In fact, sometimes not even two Opterons or four Itaniums will get the job done. If you want to model seismic activity along the west coast to predict when “the big one” is coming, or track every economic Read more…
Will Tomorrow’s CPUs Give Off Light Instead of Heat? There’s been a lot of talk about the convergence of computing and communications in recent years — a lot more talk than actual convergence. One reason or stumbling block has been that modern communications systems are increasingly optical, with beams of light flowing through fiber-optic tubes, Read more…
Looking Beyond 90-Nanometer Processes Ever since Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on (and hence the power of) a silicon chip would double every couple of years, Moore’s Law has depended on squeezing more transistors into a smaller space. For that to continue past the next few years, Read more…