Skip to main content

A Guide to the Brains of your Device: The CPU

[Picture Credit: Intel]

MUHAMMAD-MAHDI HIRJI

Intel has just announced their latest 12th gen silicon, the Alder Lake chip, meaning this is the perfect time to discuss how such devices work. This chip is unlike past processors, as Intel has changed their product slightly. But before discussing this, let us learn about the basics of a CPU first.

A CPU (Central Processing Unit) is essentially the brains of a computer. It executes instructions sent by a computer program. It is built from the ground up from transistors, allowing it to make the quick calculations needed to run a program, or even an entire operating system. Transistors are effectively a group of gates that run on binary code. Binary code is the format in which the computer receives its instructions, represented in 1s or 0s (1 being open/on, 0 being closed/off). This is, at the lowest level, how everything is done on a device, be it watching a video, or sending an email.

One of the most common advancements in CPU technology is being able to make the transistors smaller, meaning you can have more of them in a core (essentially many small CPUs on a single chip; when the CPU was first invented, it only had 1 core, but now, there are up to 64 cores in a CPU). Therefore, you can run more CPU-intensive tasks on a computer.

This led to a type of chip called a System on a Chip (SoC), used in phones and tablets, which have essentially the same architecture as a CPU, but act in a more power efficient way. However, in November 2020, Apple put an upgraded SoC called the M1 chip, based on their A14 Bionic SoC, in a laptop. This not only meant the laptop was more power efficient, but also more powerful than many top end CPUs, thanks to the extreme optimisation between their SoC and their operating system. Because of this, Apple laptop sales have skyrocketed, and so Intel decided to follow in their footsteps.

So, with Intel’s latest 12th generation Alder Lake CPU’s, Intel has not only optimised their chip for the latest edition of Windows, Windows 11, which will soon be released, but also made a chip that is a mix between a SoC and a CPU. They have done this by using not only "Performance Cores", the normal cores found in a CPU, but also "Efficiency Cores". Efficiency Cores are used for lightweight tasks (therefore they can be smaller - see leading image - and hence less power intensive). The Performance Cores do not have to be used for these tasks, making the task consume less power.

If you liked this article, please leave a comment down below; I would love to hear your thoughts. If you did not, then please tell me about that too, and I will try to make it better next time. Until then, thanks for reading this article, and goodbye!

Muhammad-Mahdi Hirji is a Year 7 Computer Science student at Watford Boys, who's passionate about the hardware that sits below the tasks we perform every day.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A CALL TO CREATIVITY

Hello and welcome to The Looking Glass, WBGS' very own Academic Blog.  This year we are planning to breathe new life into this amazing blog as the Academic Head Boy team for 2025- 2026! However, at the Looking Glass we need your help to catapult this blog into it's GOLDEN AGE.  We need your articles, your essays, your opinions and your finest work to MAKE THE LOOKING GLASS GREAT AGAIN! If you have read something interesting or watched something that sparked a thought on social media -  WRITE ABOUT IT! If you entered a competition, however big or small - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you are interested in a specific field, issue or period - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you have produced artwork, a piece of music or creative writing - WE WILL PUBLISH IT! Your creative skills have been called to action - now we must muster to create, discover and explore.  You are the creative minds of the future. The Plato's, the Newtons, the Angelo's, the Nietzsche's. This is your calling.  This is Y...
1 comment
Read more

Complexity for complexity’s sake? The Ars subtilior repertory

MR B. F. EASTLEY, MATHEMATICS TEACHER This essay provides a brief overview of a fascinating period of musical development during the latter half of the fourteenth century, during which some of the most sophisticated music ever written was composed and performed. The ‘Ars subtilior’ or ‘subtler art’ (a 20th century musicologist’s title) is a repertory of several hundred songs by French, Italian, Flemish, and Spanish musicians. This music is quite distinct from other contemporary compositions due to its dazzling complexity in all aspects – particularly rhythmic – but also harmonic, textual, and sometimes visual.
Post a Comment
Read more

Clair de Lune: The history of the world’s most overplayed piano piece

CHAMOD SAMARASINGHE Classical music is an unusual art. It is dominated by a few pieces which are far more popular than everything else which has been composed within the past few centuries. When compared to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Bach’s toccata in d minor, Handel’s messiah and fur Elise (and a few others), everything else is a comparative blur to most. Scholars could argue that this is due to their memorable nature and overall simplicity (for the listener, not the composer), but there is one notable exception to this rule: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. While the opening melody is certainly ear-catching and repetitive, everything else seems deliberately ambiguous, perfectly melancholy, and at times downright unusual. 
Post a Comment
Read more