Discussing the innermost workings of the computer hardware is beyond the scope of this class. You will find such information in a computer architecture course. However, I do think it's important to understand a few key components and what they do. So let's continue our discussion by talking a bit about game technology hardware. Within your computing device, be it a personal computer, home consle, or mobile device, it will have these components. A motherboard, sometimes referred to as a logic board, which connects all of the hardware components. A power supply to power everything and possibly cool it. A central processing unit or CPU. Random access memory modules for the computer's working memory while executing a program. Storage devices in the form of a hard disk drive or solid state drive for persistent memory to store programs and data. A graphics processing unit or external graphics card for processing graphics and interfacing with a display. An audio processing unit or external audio card. A network processing unit or external network card for connecting to the network. And any number of external ports for interfacing the device to external inputs and outputs, like keyboards, displays, and the like. Let's talk about a few of these components in more depth. The CPU or central processing unit resides in almost any computing device, from your game console, to your personal computer, to your smartphone. The CPU is responsible for processing and executing instructions. It is basically the digital brains of your device. It works with other components of the hardware such as memory, input, output, and storage to make the computer work. Modern CPUs are composed of billions of small transistors that together run the software instructions. Over time we've been able to pack more and more transistors in smaller and smaller spaces. This has improved the speed of CPUs over the decades. Moore's Law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years. Or said another way, computer processing power doubles roughly every two years. More computing power means more performance, which means more complex games are possible. This can include complexity and gameplay logic, physics, artificial intelligence, inputs and outputs, among other things. Originally, CPUs had a single processing core, today's modern CPUs consist of multiple cores that allow you to perform multiple instructions at once, effectively cramming several CPUs on a single chip. Another important metric is how many instructions the CPU can process per second. On modern CPUs, this is often measured in gigahertz, or billions of instructions per second. We call this the clock speed of the CPU. And there is the amount of memory that the CPU can reference and the amount of data that the CPU can process at once. This is often measured in bits of information, but the earliest CPUs only processing four bits at a time. Over time as CPUs advanced, then 8 bits, 16 bits, 32 bits, and most processors today work at 64 bits. And finally, cache memory is ultra high speed memory that typically sits within the CPU itself and provides faster access to data. Overall, the more cores, the faster the clock speed, the larger the bus, and the more cache, typically the more powerful the processor. But the CPU is not the entire picture of a computer's performance. The CPU works in conjunction with the random access memory or RAM which holds the programs and data that are currently being executed by the computer. The RAM is often referred to as system or working memory of the computer and typically is much larger and less expensive than cache memory. Overall the amount and the speed of the RAM has a huge impact on the computer's performance. With games it's not just about performance in general but also graphics performance. Games have required faster and faster graphics performance over the years to drive more and more pixels, as well as more computational power when making the transition from 2D graphics to 3D graphics. In the mid-1990s, processing of graphics on high end computers was moved off the CPU and into a dedicated graphics processing unit, or GPU, typically with its own high speed memory separate from the computer's RAM. At this time, the GPU was typically in the form of a plugin card from 3dfx, and later, NVIDIA and ATI The dedicated GPU allowed for real-time rendering of graphics. Rudementary as first, but as the technology advanced we were able to design more and more realistic games. In modern computers, the GPU is sometimes integrated into the CPU which is called integrated graphics. Or as just discussed, the GPU is on a separate chipset, often in the form of an expansion graphics card such as the NVIDIA GeForce series. The separate GPU is called dedicated or discrete graphics. Dedicated GPUs are often used for the most high performance graphics applications, such as virtual reality. Most computer devices today come with an integrated audio chip on the motherboard, to process the audio needs. However, just like the case in graphics, you sometimes may want to add a dedicated audio expansion card or external USB sound card if your audio needs surpass the integrated audio. Let me talk briefly about a recent trend in chip design called System On a Chip or SOC. A System On a Chip is an integrated circuit that combines all or most components of a computer or electronic system into a single chip. These components almost always include a central processing unit, GPU, memory, and input and output port controllers. This was first done in mobile devices such as smartphones and Internet of Things devices, such as those built around the Raspberry Pi. Today, SOC is now also being used in game consoles and personal computers. [MUSIC]
