Phil Penne Creations
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This is an excerpt from my book, Geezer Tech: The Guide to Living with Technology for Baby Boomers and Before. This section is an explanatory piece dealing with the relative processing speeds of various CPU's (Central Processing Units), explained in terms that are easily grasped by those intimidated by technology.
...This might be a good time to talk a little bit about the CPU - not so I can dazzle you with my technical know-how, but so when the salesman at the electronics store tells you about the power of the computer you’re looking at, you’ll have some idea of what he’s babbling about.
The CPU of the original IBM PC when it came out in 1981 was an 8-bit, 4.77 megahertz processor. Totally meaningless, right? Agreed - so let’s put this in terms that are easier to relate to.
The number of ‘bits’ for a CPU is basically how much information the brain of the computer can handle at one time (‘bit’ is actually an acronym for BInary digiT - and, no, you don’t need to remember that). The ‘megahertz’ is a measurement of how fast the chip can work. Look at it like a shovel: Let’s say you’ve got a shovel that can hold 8 pounds of dirt, and you can dig right around 5 shovelfuls of dirt a minute. If we pretend that each ‘megahertz’ is 1 shovelful per minute, that’s the rate at which the original IBM PC was working.
Then IBM came out with the Model AT; that one was quite a bit faster, having a 16-bit processor running at 12 megahertz (which is most often abbreviated as ‘MHz’). So now you’ve got a shovel that holds twice as much dirt - 16 pounds instead of 8 - and you’re moving 12 shovelfuls of dirt a minute instead of just 5. Pretty fast, huh?
But hold your horses. As technology advanced, CPU’s could handle still more data, and handle it even faster. What was called the ‘386’ CPU was a 32-bit processor running at 33 megahertz - so now you’ve got a shovel that holds 32 pounds of dirt, and you’re digging 33 shovelfuls of dirt every minute, not just 12.
So, have you broken a sweat shoveling yet? No? Then let’s get away from ancient history (at least in terms of technology) and move into the here-and-now.
The computer I use at work has a 64-bit CPU running at 4 gigahertz. Whoa - hang on - gigahertz? What in heaven’s name is a 'giga'? Well, in computer lingo, kilo- means thousands, mega- designates millions, and giga- represents billions. So, the ‘shovel’ we’re using now holds 64 pounds of dirt, and we’re moving - are you ready for this - 4 thousand shovelfuls of dirt a minute (keep in mind that I’m equating 1 megahertz to 1 shovelful per minute, and that 1 billion is equal to a thousand million). Yikes.
So, comparing the 8 bit 4.77 megahertz computer first introduced by IBM to the 64 bit, 4 GHz (GHz is shorthand for gigahertz) computer I have in my cubicle, I’m ‘shoveling’ nearly 7 thousand times as much data as I would be with one of those early machines. Now that you see the astronomical difference between the two types of CPU, that should help you understand why they need so much more cooling. Believe me, if you were doing 7,000 times more work, you’d need additional cooling too.