The Varying Speeds of the Digital World

Now seen as a necessity for every modern day researcher the computer has become an essential part of scientific study. Through an accident that left 18 year old freshman Roger Rodriguez temporarily injured he has discovered a fascination with the computational power and elaborate design of these machines.

Roger, a student at the University of Miami, is an aspiring engineer with a passion for technology and a love of sports. During a basketball game in the summer of 2007, Roger “rolled” his ankle causing him to suffer from a second degree sprain. With sports not being an option Roger began to spend time working on computers and studied how they functioned.

The first computers were fairly simple machines by the standards of today. The primary function of these computers were to perform mathematical calculations which now is merely a task belonging to handheld counterparts (i.e. calculators.) These early machines were large enough to fill rooms, and weighed upwards of 30 tons. One early example would be the ENIAC which was a computer used by the military in the 1940s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC). Built for the purpose of using mathematical equations to calculate artillery firing tables, it was considered a marvel boasting 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. Vacuum tubes and crystal diodes are no longer common computer components, it wasn’t until Roger got to processors that his curiosity was truly peaked.

Here is a picture from wikimedia showing the enormous size of ENIAC:

Modern day computers are composed of a case, motherboard, processor, digital memory, hard drive, cooling fans, fire wire, disk drives, sound card, video card, and a network card. A case containing these components also hold a transformer, and a voltage control which supply the computer with its power. This is one of the major space saving alterations that made the computer into a personal work station. A case containing the previously mentioned replaces the 17,468 vacuum tubes that were needed in the 1940s to power a computer.

The processor, or CPU, can be considered the brain and blood of a computer. It is built with a certain class of logic machines that execute functions in a computer. These functions, or programs, are contained in a specific code, which are essentially instructions on how to execute the program. The code is transmitted through the processor, read, and recognized, and then instructions are sent out to the rest of the computer to perform various functions.

Roger studied these machines to find that recent technological advances have yielded what are known as multiprocessors. These processors come two forms called “duo” and “quad”. This refers to the actual amount of cores on a processor. As seen below a processor and its core components are so small that even though there is a noticeable visual difference between the two it is not by much.

Picture from legitreviews.com

Knowing that a processor’s speed is measured in gigahertz, GHz, Roger noticed that a quad processor with a 2.66 GHz feed rate would actually have a speed four times greater than a single core 2.66 GHz processor. Since these processors can work together to divide the work they are required to do. So, in an engineering endeavor Roger concluded that he would construct his own computer and include one of these powerhouses.

Studying processors inevitably leads you to two names, AMD and Intel. These have been the two large competitors for computer processors in the past years. AMD is a newer company and had struggled to get their clock times up to par with its competitor who had long since been established. The Athlon processor was the first release that posed a serious challenge to Intel. It had comparable clock times and sold for nearly half the price. Reading about both companies and weighing price v.s clock speeds it was Roger’s decision to go the more established Intel. He invested in a quad processor with a speed of 2.66 GHz. Even now in 2008 this is considered a high tech and state of the art piece of technology.

Without question, computers will continue to move forward with stronger and faster components. Future engineers such as Roger will most likely even play a major role in the creation of these new parts.

Below is a video from youtube.com going through the process of creating one of these amazing processors:

~ by SeanMichael on January 23, 2008.