The inspiration. If you look really close, you might see a few droplets of my drool left over.

This post was spurred by looking at Mr. Lewis’ new computer.  Mainly due to the fact he was running OS X on a home built Intel Core i7.  Now, that may mean nothing to some of you, but that means the middle-named N had to make sure all his hardware was  Apple friendly, because as I learned, their operating system is picky.  That is the true mark of a Mac enthusiast, will they go out of their way to run OS X outside of an Apple supplied system?    I digress.  The i7 and its parent family of processor aren’t anything terribly new, they were released back in 2008.  What makes these processors special are the utter complexity of how they are utilized.

It used to be anybody could understand processing power.  500mhz was dummy proof, 1.6ghz still easy to comprehend, even when we hit the ceiling at around 3.5 ghz they weren’t all that complicated.  But now, things have gotten much more complicated.  This new breed of processor began back with the old Pentium 4′s, continued with the dual cores and are now combined into a monster of science and techno-speak.  Unless you have studied hyperthreading, microarchitecture, how/what multi-cores and 64-bit processing are and work, you are now in the dark as to just how powerful modern computers can be.

Having just gleaned the surface of these topics, the easiest way to explain this (as most of the uneducated Best Buy sales associates will say) is that “it makes everything go faster.”  That is a gross over simplification though, because combined with the appropriate operating system, an i7 isn’t just an engine that makes everything quicker, it has more in common with a well trained animal.  It knows how and when to use all of its resources and will perform perfectly, of course only when it’s told.

This is just consumer tech we’re talking about here.  It’s no wonder that robotics and AI are on the up and up lately.  Or that video games and film CG are doing things we once thought impossible.  Maybe we’ve reached the ceiling on raw processing power, but now we’ve taken our eyes off the sky and are noticing just how much more room we have to play around with.