Electronics are handy and play a massive role in today’s world. There are phones, tablets, computers, and video games; The list goes on and on and on… But what do all these things have in common? Well, all these devices are composed very similarly. They all contain a CPU and GPU.
You might be asking yourself ‘what the heck do those words even mean?’. Well, think of the CPU and GPU as your brain. Now try doing maths without a brain. Impossible right? Without your brain, you can’t walk, talk or do anything at all. That’s what a CPU and GPU do for an electronic. The CPU processes and thinks, while the GPU works with it to display the information. But today, we are going to focus on explaining the CPU.
CPU
CPUs are built by placing millions and billions of transistors on one singular computer chip. What exactly is a transistor? A transistor is basically a switch that amplifies and switches electrical current, which lets the CPU produce ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros are used to process anything, from writing an email, to watching funny cat videos on Youtube.
That’s when Moore’s Law comes in. Moore’s law predicted that every two years, the number of transistors in a chip will double. This law is pretty amazing, considering that computer chips today contain already minuscule 7nm transistors. For reference, 1 nm is around the size of an atom! Can you get any smaller than that?
source: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/11/Transistor-Count-over-time.png
