How it Works: Making Sense of Computer Technology

Buying a computer can be challenging. We'll help you understand the tech and more in the first installment of our new “How it Works” series.

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.notebookreview.com/feature/how-it-works-making-sense-of-computer-technology/

 

I'm not sure it'd be fair to describe a KB as something like 1024 bytes (so on and so forth). HDD OEMs (and, iirc, SSD OEMs too) measure their products' capacities in powers of ten (such as kilobyte, KB), whereas computers actually use powers of two internally (such as kibibyte, KiB). Ignoring the OS install, some users might be confused that they're getting less space than what the OEM said they'd get. IMO, it might be a good idea to have a disclaimer somewhere in the article that highlights this issue.

Otherwise, it's an excellent primer for the computer illiterate.

 

Computers are extremely complicated things. It's nice little guides like these that show that notebookreview.com cares about the average, technologically-challenged person.

Unfortunately it's going to take a whole book to explain even the basics.

The Intel and AMD processors need to be fleshed out some more, and they're obviously not equal in processing power.

- Both AMD A10 and A8's are quad-cores
- AMD A10's can only match up to the Core i5
- A8's to Core i3 and i5
- A6 to Core i3 and Pentium
- A4 to Pentium and Celeron

These are just approximations, but generally AMD's CPUs aren't up there with Intel, and Intel's CPUs are more efficient with their higher IPC.

The GPU's are much easier to explain because they're mostly used for games.
- Older GPU's like the HD 7000M and 600M series should be included since a lot of computer may still use these.

This sounds like a good starting point and I'm looking forward to the "How This Works" series.

 

Well, explaining exactly *why* AMD's falling being Intel CPU-wise would be a bit involved and would certainly be above what the Average Joe would understand. You'd have to explain how the A-series APUs (and FX-series) cores are classified; for example, the A8/A10 have four ALUs but only two FPUs to share with those four ALUs while in Intel's quad-core CPUs there is a 1:1 ratio of ALUs to FPUs, AMD's manufacturing processes are less efficient than Intel's, so on and so forth.

Personally, I'm fine with how the CPUs are explained in the article as-is, even though the A10 is fairly behind the i7 quads in certain situations (especially in tasks that benefit from the hardware advantages Intel CPUs are currently enjoying). The Average Joe realistically would be just fine being ignorant of these technical details since the majority of these people could barely stress a Pentium in most tasks, let alone an A10/i7.

It would be nice to include the 7000M/8000M and the 600M in the GPU comparisons, though some reminder that the customer should look into benchmarks of the hardware they're considering should be good enough.

 

You would also have to include a discussion about instruction sets.

 

Might as well add in a few paragraphs for high-level languages, how compilers and linkers transform that high-level code to assembly, then how assemblers transform that code to machine code, compiled vs interpreted code, etc....

Hell, might as well enroll them in a computer science degree .