Eli5: what is inside a cpu, and how does it perform thousands of calculations a second?
In: Technology
Inside a CPU there are billions of transistors, generally configured into NAND gates. Transistors are Hyper-Faster-faster-super switches that are a few hundreds atoms wide and can commute billions of times a second.
But the internal clockwork of even a basic 1950 CPU is complicated to understand even to the ones that have experience in computer hardware.
You can try to think of a CPU like a player piano or automatic piano with a crankThe roll of paper contains the code to be executed.When you spin the crank half a revolution, one beat of the score is played, and when you complete a revolution another beat is played (this is the clock of the CPU)Now you start to spin the crank at a fucking 4.2 billions revolutions per second and you are playing a lot of notes all of a sudden.
The piano will get really hot from all that movement and friction so you better be pointing a large fan on it. If you want to spin the crank faster, you should consider buying a large water hoose and drench that piano in water at least while you are spinning the crank.
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