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You probably use a computer every day, but have you ever wondered what the building blocks of your device are?
Let us give a quick overview of how computer architecture has evolved over the years and what it will look like in near future.
In the old days of computers, we thought of the CPU as the brain of computer.
The reason for that is very simple – CPUs performs the logical operations.
In this era, many people measured the computer’s speed by the clock rate, usually in MHz or GHz.
However, as computer architecture evolved this metric became less relevant, as performance can be effected by very wide range of design choices.
The number of cores in the CPU, BUS speeds, available memory and so on.
At this time GPUs were mostly good for displaying the image on the screen, but not much more.
Because of its high-power consumption and high performance this architecture was mostly used in tower desktops.
About ten or fifteen years ago three significant things happened.
First as the popularity of games grew, GPUs became much more powerful in order to be able to render 3D images; in other words to play 3D Games.
Secondly, IGP was introduced as the result of integrated graphics processor with the Northbridge chip.
IGPs contain part of the system memory, dedicated to graphics.
IGPs could work together with graphics cards, now called discrete graphics cards or dGPUs, for additional performance.
And thirdly, 64-bit architecture was introduced to CPUs to allow wider physical and virtual memory and programs to store larger amounts of data in memory.
The memory controller was also moved from Northbridge to the CPU, to speed up the CPU access time to memory.
This architecture marks the era of laptops and high-performance desktops.
CPUs are great when it comes to processing serial workloads, but GPUs that have many more cores are better at processing parallel workloads.
APUs combine CPU and GPU into a single piece of silicon.
APUs replaced IGPs. The APU is the future of modern processor design.
In many computational tasks, offloading CPU workloads to GPU means greater performance improvement and extended battery life.
This architecture enabled tablets, smartphones an ultra-thin notebooks.
The only thing more exciting than doing something better than you have ever done before is doing something entirely new.
For example, what if you could log in to your computer just by looking at the screen.
What if it could respond, to just a gesture or your voice command.
Many of this capabilities exist today in labs all over the world. Why haven’t they found their way to the mainstream yet?
The answer is in the limitations of the existing hardware architecture and software programming models.
And this is why Heterogeneous Systems Architecture or HSA is vital to enabling the next era of computing innovation.
HSA will remove GPU bottlenecks when accessing system memory and unlock GPU computing performance.
This architecture should enable the era of natural user interfaces and surround computing.
System on a chip integrates APU with Southbridge into one piece of silicon, increasing chip integration and enabling super-computing in the palm of your hand.
This architecture will enable new levels of experience in the thin and light form factor across all of today’s devices and facilitate the creation of future ones.
There is no such thing as a final state of computer architecture,
but SoC & heterogeneous computing represent a quantum leap in processor design, and are set to revolutionize how the next generation of computing devices and user experiences will look.
CPU or Central Processing Unit or Microprocesor.
System memory or Main Memory or DDR (SDRAM)
Northbridge – a hub that enables GPU and CPU to access system memory
Southbridge – a hub for such peripherals as keyboard, mouse, printer, hard drive, Ethernet, USB and audio
Video card or graphics card houses graphics memory or GDDR and GPU
IGP or Integrated Graphics Processor combines GPU and northbridge
APU or Accelerated Processing Unit combines CPU and GPU
SoC or System-on-a-chip combines APU and Southbridge
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