CS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Software, Touchpad, Linux Foundation
25 Oct 2017
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Document Summary
The physical equipment and devices that a computer is made of. The magic of the cpu is twofold: a lot can be accomplished with those few basic operations, and, cpus are really really fast. There are a few key characteristics of a cpu that are worth paying attention to: make & model. Each manufacturer has different cpu models that will determine the characteristics of the cpu. For example, an intel i7 processor is more powerful than an i3 processor: speed. The speed of a modern cpu is measured in ghz (gigahertz). A 3 ghz processor can theoretically perform 3 billion operations per second (giga = billion, hertz = per second): number of cores. Most modern cpus are a combination of several processors or cores. A quad-core processor has four independent processors built into a single chip. Effectively, a quad-core can do four times as much computation as a single core.
