16 posts
Almost every computer chip starts as silicon. So why are computer chips made of silicon, and not copper, carbon or gold? The short answer: silicon is a semiconductor, it is cheap and plentiful, it grows into huge…
Open the side of a gaming PC and you may see tubes, a block on the processor and a radiator with fans. So how does liquid cooling work in a computer? A liquid flows over the hot chip, soaks up its heat, carries it to a…
What is on a circuit board? If you have ever opened a computer or an old phone, you have seen one: a flat board covered in thin lines, tiny parts and a few big chips. This guide explains what each of those things is, how…
What is a load balancer? It is a piece of software or hardware that sits in front of a group of servers and hands each incoming request to one of them, so no single server is swamped while the others sit idle. This guide…
What is clock speed? It is how many steps a processor takes each second, set by a clock inside the chip that ticks billions of times a second. It is the GHz number on every spec sheet, and it comes up in the free browser…
What is overclocking? It is running a computer chip faster than the clock speed its maker rated it for. People do it to get more speed from the same hardware, often for games. It has real costs in heat, power and risk,…
What is instruction pipelining? It is the trick that lets a processor work on several instructions at once, each at a different step, instead of finishing one before starting the next. This guide explains it in plain…
Spec sheets for laptops and phones list "cores" and "threads" as if everyone knows what they mean. So what is a CPU core? It is one complete processing unit inside the processor chip: a small engine that reads a…
Any disk drive can fail. The question is what you lose when it does. So what is RAID? RAID, short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a way of spreading your data across two or more drives so the set works as…
Your program gives the wrong answer and you have no idea why. You could read the code again, line by line, and guess. Or you could stop the program in the middle of running and look. That is what a breakpoint is for. So…
Every program uses memory while it runs: for the text you type, the pictures on screen, the enemies in a game. When the program is done with a piece of memory, someone has to give it back, or the program slowly fills up.…
Your laptop runs a game smoothly for ten minutes, then the fan roars and everything gets sluggish. Nothing is broken. What is thermal throttling? It is a processor slowing itself down on purpose because it is getting too…
Processor boxes list cores and threads, and programming courses warn about them early. What is multithreading? It is one program doing several things at once by splitting its work into threads: separate streams of…
Computing lessons and spec sheets talk about buses, 32-bit and 64-bit systems, and data moving "over the bus" as if everyone knew what that meant. So what is a data bus? A bus is the set of shared lines that carries data…
You see the word in update notes, in error messages and in talk about phones and servers: the kernel. So what does a kernel do? In short, it is the part of the operating system that runs the computer itself. It decides…
Every program you run spends much of its time waiting for data. A CPU cache is how a processor avoids most of that waiting. This guide explains how a CPU cache works in plain words: what it stores, what happens on a hit…