Motherboards, processors and memory: CPU
The first item – CPU, or Central Processing Unit. Engineers much smarter than I have designed wafer of silicon that can help speed up computing to amazing speeds. Speaking of speeds – you’ll need to know that processors are rating with Ghz – gigahertz – one hertz in CPU term is one instruction per second. 3 Ghz, is three trillion instructions per second. The average CPU of today ranges from 2.1 GHz to upwards of 4.0 Ghz. There’s an addage in computing that was broken in the 2018-2020 timeframe – CPU computing power (number of transistors) double every 24 months, and cost of computers will be halved. This was known a Moore’s Law.
This came to an end partly because of the limit of silicon technology (readily available but it heats up the more voltage used) – while the two main manufacturers, Intel and AMD, research other elements to get more and more transistors on a printed system that no bigger than 3×3 wafer (roughly) and can cool properly. Just know that Moore’s Law was true for more than 40 years when technology finally caught up to nature.
One of the races in the CPU world is all about cores. In the 90s, it was a single core/single CPU world. As technology advanced, Intel and AMD found if you put two CPUs together, making a dual-core system, add a way for them to share data, that the system would run faster, if the applications could use the other core, while the CPU ran on one. This started a race to maximize cores that has let to this day, some really neat capabilities. Windows, MACOS, and Linux are all multi-core aware, and even the current Intel (i3, i5, i7, i9) and AMD (Ryzen) budget desktop cpus are pushing 8 and 12 cores.
The other race has been clock speed. Now, we started PCs with mega-hertz ratings (the Intel 286 was a 10 MHz processor). Yes, it would run around 10 million instructions, in machine code. Today’s i7 run in the 3.7Ghz range, with 8 cores. The CPUs of today are more complex, faster, and therefore, warmer than their predecessors. As clock speeds are increased, more power is needed, and more heat is generated. Too hot and the cpu will fail, so it’s a balance of performance and heat – and the recent use of active cooling (water or liquid pumps in a closed system to increase cooling) lead some enthusiasts to overclock their systems – intentionally increasing the voltage and clock speeds to eek out a little faster performance.