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You asked: How fast is the fastest microprocessor chip, now and in the future? Marshall Brain answers: Today, in 2011, the fastest microprocessor chips that are commercially available to “normal people” are the six-core hyperthreaded chips from Intel. These chips run at approximately 3.3 gigahertz and each core can execute two threads. If everything is [...]
This week Nvidia announced its latest Tegra processor for Tablet computers and smartphones. The chip has 4 cores, which appears to be a first in this class of CPUs. This gives it unprecedented power, as demonstrated in this video: Here is what it means in real terms – the ability to drive 1440p displays: “We [...]
Blast from the Past – How Integrated Circuits (chips) Work
by Marshall Brain | January 24, 2011
The following video takes us back to Fairchild Semiconductors in 1967, as the age of integrated circuits is getting underway. It is talking about integrated circuits that contain 20 components (transistors, resistors, etc.), and therefore are far simpler than the billion-transistor chips we see today. It is also an era when the masks used to [...]
Back in March 2010, Intel announced its 6-core chips for high-end gaming machines (and other machines needing huge performance):
Intel’s Core i7-980X Launches with a Bang
The Core i7-980X has six cores and comes with Intel’s Hyper-threading technology. This means it can work on twelve streams at once. This is a boon for people that need multi-processing, like graphics professionals transcoding videos, or people doing 3D rendering in software (think CGI).
Would normal people ever need that kind of CPU power? And what about 5 years down the road…
If you go back in time a couple of decades, talking dolls used little plastic phonograph records like you see here:
The mechanism is beautiful and it creates sounds with pure mechanics – no electronics at all. These things were so rugged that you could drop them in the tub, shake them out and they would still work fine.
Today that’s all been replaced by cheap electronics as you can see here…
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