Computer Processor

A central processing unit (CPU) is an electronic circuit that can execute computer programs. This broad definition can easily be applied to many early computers that existed long before the term "CPU" ever came into widespread usage. The term itself and its initialism have been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s (Weik 1961). The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed dramatically since the earliest examples, but their fundamental operation has remained much the same.
Early CPUs were custom-designed as a part of a larger, sometimes one-of-a-kind, computer. However, this costly method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of mass-produced processors that are suited for one or many purposes. This standardization trend generally began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has rapidly accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit (IC). The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers. Both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of these digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in everything from automobiles to cell phones to children's toys.
Abbreviation for central processing unit, and pronounced as separate letters. The CPU is the brains of the computer. Sometimes referred to simply as the central processor,but more commonly called processor, the CPU is where most calculations take place. In terms of computing power, the CPU is the most important element of a computer system.
On large machines, CPUs require one or more printed circuit boards. On personal computers and small workstations, the CPU is housed in a single chip called a microprocessor. Since the 1970's the microprocessor class of CPUs has almost completely overtaken all other CPU implementations.
The CPU itself is an internal component of the computer. Modern CPUs are small and square and contain multiple metallic connectors or pins on the underside. The CPU is inserted directly into a CPU socket, pin side down, on the motherboard. Each motherboard will support only a specific type or range of CPU so you must check the motherboard manufacturer's specifications before attempting to replace or upgrade a CPU. Modern CPUs also have an attached heat sink and small fan that go directly on top of the CPU to help dissipate heat.
Two typical components of a CPU are the following:
The arithmetic logic unit (ALU), which performs arithmetic and logical operations.
The control unit (CU), which extracts instructions from memory and decodes and executes them, calling on the ALU when necessary.
The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is responsible for interpreting and executing most of the commands from the computer's hardware and software. It is often called the "brains" of the computer.
The CPU is also known as processor, microprocessor, central processor, “the brains of the computer.
If you’re in the market for a new computer, it’s necessary to understand the function of a CPU. Also known as the Central Processing Unit or processor, the CPU is essentially the “brains” of your computer. Without the CPU, you wouldn’t be able to play games, type research papers, or surf the Internet. Your computer would basically be a very expensive paperweight.
Sometimes people mistakenly believe the case or chassis of a computer is the CPU. However, a CPU is an internal component of the computer. You can’t see it from the outside of the system; you’d have to peek inside and remove both the CPU heatsink and fan to get a good look.
The first CPUs were used in the early 1960s. They were custom designed as part of a larger computer, making them prohibitively expensive. Once engineers figured out how to mass produce the CPU, personal computers became more affordable for the average American. With the introduction of the integrated circuit in the late 1970s, it became possible for smaller CPUs to be manufactured as well. This helped transform computers from large, bulky devices that took up entire rooms to more manageable desktop and laptop models.
Today, Intel is the best-known manufacturer of computer CPUs. No matter what type of computer you have, however, your CPU works by executing a series of stored instructions known as a program. Most CPUs conform to the von Neumann architecture, which says that the CPU must fetch, decode, execute, and writeback the data in a fairly rapid succession.
Since the CPU is one of the most important parts of a computer, it should come as no surprise that it is also the most expensive. In fact, if your computer is more than three years old and your CPU has been damaged by static electricity or some other factor, you may want to consider upgrading to an entirely new computer. A newer, faster CPU will often provide enough additional computing power to make the purchase a wise investment.
CPUs are sometimes called microprocessors, although these two terms are not quite interchangeable. The microprocessor, first introduced in the 1970s, reduces the word size of a CPU from 32 bits to 4 bits in an attempt to allow the transistors of the logic circuits to fit on a single part. Often, it takes more than one microprocessor to perform all of the functions of a CPU. Microprocessors are also commonly used in cell phones, automobiles, and children’s electronic toys.
So what is the processor? Well in the simplest of terms, it’s your computers brain. The processor tells your computer what to do and when to do it, it decides which tasks are more important and prioritizes them to your computers needs.
There is and has been many processors on the market, running at many different speeds. The speed is measured in Megahertz or MHz. A single MHz is a calculation of 1 million cycles per second (or computer instructions), so if you have a processor running at 2000 MHz, then your computer is running at 2000,000,000 cycles per second, which in more basic terms is the amount of instructions your computer can carry out. Another important abbreviation is Gigahertz or GHz. A single GHz or 1 GHz is the same as 1000 MHz . Sounds a bit confusing, so here is a simple conversion :
1000 MHz (Megahertz) = 1GHz (Gigahertz) = 1000,000,000 Cycles per second (or computer instructions).
Now you can see why they abbreviate it, could you imagine going to a PC store and asking for a one thousand million cycle PC please. A bit of a mouth full isn’t it?
So when buying a new computer always look for fastest you can afford. The fastest on the market at the time of writing this article is 3.8 GHz (3800 MHz). Remember though that it is not necessary to purchase such a fast processor, balance your needs, do you really need top of the range? Especially when the difference say between a 3.5 GHz (3500 MHz) and a 3.8 GHz (3800 MHz) processor will be barely noticed (if noticed at all) by you, while the price difference is around £100. With the money you save you could get a nice printer and scanner package.
Now that we have covered the speeds, there is one more important subject to cover. Which processor? There are 3 competitors at present, the AMD Athlon, Intel Pentium and the Intel Celeron. They come in many guises, but basically the more cores they have and the higher the speed means better and faster.
Processors now come as dual core, triple core and quad core. These processors are the equivalent of running two cpu's (Dual core), three CPU's ( Triple core) or four (Quad core).
In the past Intel Pentium the best and most expensive of them all, and remains today one of the most popular on the market. In layman’s terms it is/was the designer processor, although AMD have some superb if not better releases and equally highly priced and advanced products. It would be hard to say which is best as they are direct competitors.
Lastly there is the Intel Celeron; this processor is a budget version of the Intel Pentium 4, the processor you find in most budget computers. If the purse is tight, and you need a computer, then this is your port of call. You will find many sub £400 computers fitted with this processor.

References

Amdahl, G. M., Blaauw, G. A., & Brooks, F. P. Jr. (1964). Architecture of the IBM System/360,
IBM Research.

Brown, Jeffery (2005). "Application-customized CPU design". IBM developerWorks.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfxbox/?ca=dgr-
lnxw07XBoxDesign. Retrieved on 2005-12-17.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/CPU.html

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/componentprofiles/p/p_cpu.htm

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-cpu.htm

http://www.hardware.windowsreinstall.com/processor.htm

Lonely People Have A Weak Health

Psychologists affirm that loneliness is not less dangerous for one than smoking and overweight, maybe even more.

The lack of relationships with other people not only makes us unhappy, but also influences negatively the health of our body and mind. These are the last scientific facts, received during a research.

The feeling of rejection or isolation increases the blood pressure, the level of stress and the general level of tiredness. It also increases the risk of the development of Alzheimer's disease.

Besides, this feeling decreases the strength of one's will and insistence, which is reflected later on the capability of leading a healthy lifestyle, scientists report.

The received results were published by Professor John Kacioppo from the University of Chicago in the annual conference of the American Association Favouring Science Development.

According to Professor Kacioppo, loneliness not only leads to behaviour changes, but it is also related to the development of the normal blood flow's resistance through the cardiovascular system.

Loneliness leads to the morning increase of the stress hormone's level (cortisol), which, in its turn, influences the immune system, raises blood pressure and leads to the development of depression.

Loneliness or social isolation also lead to sleep disturbances and to a quick progression of Alzheimer's disease.

The professor affirms that, from the point of view of health, the difference between a lonely and a socially popular man is similar to the difference between "a smoker and a non-smoker".

"This discovery has totally surprised us all – me and my colleagues – because of the consequences brought about by loneliness. This fact shows how important human communication is for every one of us", he says.

"Lonely people, as a rule, have a weak health. They rarely make physical exercises and consume more calories. In order to feel comfortable, they eat more sweet and fat food. Loneliness also decreases the capability of self-control. It is very easy for these people to have 2 or 3 drinks of alcohol at the end of a bad day", the professor added.

Professor Kacioppo is the founder of a new subject, called social neurology. According to him, the human necessity in other people has deep evolutional roots.

In the past, in order to survive people had to cooperate, besides it was easier for them to raise their children in this way. This is how, during the process of evolution, loneliness became a "signal" to action, to the necessity of repairing social relationships, as when physical pain is a signal of the necessity of changing one's behaviour, of not touching fire for example.

http://www.infoniac.com/health-fitness/lonely-people-have-a-weak-health.html

samy said:

Cool information. Now I understand why people who are emo commit suicide. Being lonely is bad for the health..

1-year-old Girl Proves To Be Pregnant

Doctors in Saudi Arabia have registered a truly phenomenal case. A 1-year-old girl had proved to be pregnant. Doctors that have been occupied with this case affirm that they haven't heard of such cases to happen anywhere in the world. The Arabian Mass-Media has already turned on the discussion about the possibility of drawing out the unborn twin from the little girl's body to be a crime.

As it turned out, the girl's mother during her pregnancy has had 2 embryos and one of them began to grow in the uterus of the second baby. Although considered phenomenal, such cases were previously knon.

The Indian town Nagpur is famous for its 36-years-old farmer, from whose body the doctors have drawn out the embryo of his brother-twin. It is curious the fact that the man has come to see the doctors only when his belly had turned so big that he couldn't breathe. When he was brought to the hospital, he was urgently sent to surgery. The surgeons were sure that the patient had a huge tumor, which was pressing on his diaphragm. During the surgery, the doctor has pulled out from the man's abdominal cavity a strange half-formed being.

India, 2002 - doctors took out an embryo out of the body of a 6-months-old boy. "We couldn't believe that we had taken out a dead embryo with a weight of 1 kg from the body of a child, whose weight was 6.5 kg. It's a very rare case," says Pradip Kumar Mukherdgey, the leading doctor of that group.

2 years before that, doctors from another hospital of Calcutta had drawn out a foetus of 230g from the body of a 40-days new born.

Such abnormality is called "fetus in fetu". Specialists say that these cases are extremely rare in the medical practice. An embryo appears in another embryo in one out of half-million pregnancies. This phenomenon takes place on an early stage of the pregnancy and, as a rule, both embryos die in the mother's uterus.

It also happens that the delivery is successfull, but the embryo "caught in the trap" continues on living as a parasite, connected to his elder brother with a sort of umbilical cord. For a certain period of time, the second embryo continues growing up equally with the other one, still remaining inside it, and when the process stops, the undeveloped foetus turns into a parasitical body.

A foetus in a foetus is considered to be alive when the tissues of his organism are not dead or have not been removed yet. The embryo's cells must have a normal metabolism in order to be capable of living. From the point of view of physical development, even if the organs of the "fetus in fetu" receive a normal blood supply from the "master", still, in all of the cases known, the parasitical embryo had a set of critical defects. As a rule, his brain, heart, lungs, gastro-intestinal tract do not function properly. Thus, the foetus in a foetus has no chances to survive beneath the limits of the brother's body. Besides, its existence is a real threat for the normal twin brother.

http://www.infoniac.com/health-fitness/year-old-girl-proves-to-be-pregnant.html

samy said:

There are mysteries in the world that only experts can explain, but not always.

Kisses Never Lie

According to a saying, eyes are mirror reflection of the soul. But British scientists from the University of Belfast affirm that eyes can lie, while lips can never do that. The way one kisses can say a lot about him/her, all-biz.info reports.

For example, the majority of men and women, circa 80 per cent of them, tend to incline towards the right side before kissing, which is a proof of a high level of sensibility, while the rest of 20 per cent, who incline their heads to the left side, have a very low emotional level.

This affirmation scientists explain by the fact that, as it is known, every hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the opposite side of the body, that's why, when opening the left cheek to the partner, precisely the right hemisphere, responsible for our emotional-sensitive sphere, influences our actions. On the contrary, by opening the left cheek to the partner while kissing, one is led by cold mathematical reasons.

Some people consider that, during a kiss, partners interchange a lot of pathogenic bacteria and microorganisms, but scientists say that it's not that bad: kisses consolidate the nervous system, making us more resistant to psychological problems.

The proof to this is the following: German scientists have established that the ones who kiss more often live in average with 5 years more than those who don't like kissing. Besides, the persons from the first group also are rarely involved in car accidents, suffer less from professional diseases and, more than that, they receive higher salaries.

This isn't surprising since one's psychological state of mind, consolidated by kissing, becomes more stable, which, without doubt, has a positive influence on all aspects of life.

Another interesting fact is that a lovers' kiss not only has an emotional energy, but also a complicated hormonal and chemical composition. Some studies determined that during kissing the level of cortisol in the organisms of the lovers is lowered. Cortisol is a hormone responsible for the intensity of stress and general anxiety.

Researchers also established that, in the same time, in men the activeness of the hormone oxytocin is increased (the increasing, in its turn, the general level of their tonus) and in women it is lowered.

http://www.infoniac.com/health-fitness/kisses-never-lie.html

samy said:

it is really great to get a kiss ^^

kiss is healthy, so let us find somebody to kiss ^^ LOL

Two Google Searches Emit as Much CO2 as Boiling a Kettle

According to researchers from the United States, performing two searches on number one search engine, Google, can produce the same mount of CO2 as boiling a kettle. They found that one search generates around 7 grams of carbon dioxide, while boiling a kettle produces about 15 grams.

When a search is made, several Google servers that can be located miles apart, compete to return the search results in the quickest time.

"Their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy," says Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard University, adding that the accuracy and the speed of Google are those that produce a large amount of CO2 due to the energy and electricity used to bring the results.

The California-based company owns around 450,000 servers worldwide, these processing the demand of over 200 million daily search inquiries. The infrastructure of Google transmits information from the server that produces the search result quicker.

Alex Wissner-Gross made a research on Google's influence on the environment. "Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power," he says. According to the physicist, the data centers are very efficient; however, their main goal is to perform quick searches, which leads to the use of a lot of energy.

According to Google officials, the company tries to take effective steps towards lowering the emission of carbon dioxide. Nonetheless Google has never presented any information on energy it spends or CO2 the company emits. "We are among the most efficient of all internet search providers," said a spokesman for the company.

Another analysis was carried out by John Buckley, working on the website called carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental site. It states that the emissions of carbon dioxide produced by one search ranges between 1g and 10g. It is the first time that scientists show the impact of computers and Internet use on the environment.

The data presented by Garnet, a US research company, the use of IT worldwide today causes around 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The emissions of CO2, produced by computer use today, outrun that of aviation industry. It is worth mentioning that last year the profits of number one search engine rose to about $6 billion, making Google one of the most popular brands in the world.

http://www.infoniac.com/environment/google-emits-carbon-dioxide.html

samy said;

Technology is indeed the enemy of environment.

Writing Verse or Prose Helps Brain Regulate Emotions

Researchers from the University of California claim that writing poems is good for a person's mental and physical health. The process of writing a poem helps our brain to regulate emotion, and decrease the feeling of nervousness, fear and sadness.

According to the researchers, writing about personal experience has a therapeutic effect due to the fact that the process holds back parts of the brain that are related to emotional disorder, and boosts the activity in the area that deals with self-control.

It doesn't matter if a person is a good writer or not. In fact, experts suggest that the simpler a verse or prose is written, the better. Currently experts are looking forward to developing special therapies based on their discovery. The therapies could be used to treat social fears and phobias.

The lead researcher of the study is Dr Matthew Lieberman, who is a neuroscientist at the University of California. The study and its results the scientist presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science where he carried out a lecture entitled Putting Feelings Into Words. He demonstrated the effect of writing after scanning the brains of 30 patients while they characterized distressing images.

Dr Lieberman discovered that the act of writing reduced the activity in the amygdala, which is an area of the brain that is related to emotion and fear. At the same time, writing raised activity in the pre-frontal cortex, the mind's regulator. The finding suggests that a simple act of writing about an emotion represented a method of calming down the brain and recreating mental balance.

"The more frontal activity we see, the less amygdala response. There seems to be a see-saw affect," says the scientist.

Another experiment involved the action of writing used in combination with exposure therapy for people who suffer from arachnophobia (fear of spiders). Experts discovered that writing about their fears increased the effect of the therapy compared to those who did not describe their feeling on the paper.

"People expressing negative emotional responses in words while being exposed gave them greater attenuation (reduction) of fear," says Dr Lieberman. The effect of the therapy was even stronger if patients were more descriptive in their fears. In addition, the scientist mentioned that writing in long-hand proved to be more effective than typing.

http://www.infoniac.com/science/writing-verse-or-prose-helps-brain-regulate-emotions.html

Scientists Discover Substance Harder than Diamond

For many years diamond has been considered the hardest material. Then it gave the first place to man-made nanomaterials that proved to be somewhat harder than the diamond. Recently researchers discovered a natural substance that is 58 percent tougher than diamond.

Together with his team Zicheng Pan at Shanghai Jiao Tong University analyzed two substances and noticed that the structure of wurtzite boron nitride is similar to that of diamond, but is composed of different atoms, while the mineral lonsdaleite, is composed of carbon atoms.

It is worth mentioning that diamond is made up of carbon atoms as well, but mineral lonsdaleite's atoms are arranged in a different shape.

Scientists simulated how the two substances withstand stress. They found that wurtzide boron nitride was able to withstand 18% more stress than diamond, while lonsdaleite 58% more. In case the same results will be registered with physical experiments, the two materials will prove to be much harder than any other substance.

The two substances are very rare in nature: lonsdaleite sometimes appears when meteorites containing graphite reach Earth and wurtzite boron nitride appears as a result of volcanic eruptions that generate extremely high temperatures and pressures, reports New Scientist.

If the physical experiments will show that wurtzite boron nitride is indeed harder than diamond it may replace the diamond, being more stable in oxygen at higher temperatures.

The features of the substance would allow placing the wurtzite boron nitride on the tips of cutting and drilling devices that operate at high temperatures. Besides wurtzite boron nitride could be used in making corrosion resistant films that are mounted on the surface of a space vehicle.

source:

http://www.infoniac.com/science/substance-harder-than-diamond.html