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Whether it's a personal desktop or an enormous supercomputer, computing power ultimately boils down to the processor. Explore more images of computers.
AP Photo/Jay LaPreteWhat makes a supercomputer truly remarkable? Can it perform extraordinary feats like leaping tall buildings or defending the rights of the innocent? In reality, its power lies in its ability to quickly process complex calculations.
In fact, that's the core of computing power. It all hinges on how quickly a machine can execute an operation. Every action a computer takes is broken down into mathematical problems. Your computer's processor translates each command you give into a series of calculations. Faster processors can perform more calculations per second and are better suited for tackling demanding tasks.
Inside your computer's CPU, there is an electronic clock responsible for generating a sequence of electrical pulses at consistent intervals. This process ensures the synchronization of all components, determining the speed at which data is retrieved from memory and calculations are executed.
When referring to your processor's gigahertz, you're actually talking about clock speed. This number reflects how many electrical pulses your CPU emits per second. For example, a 3.2 gigahertz processor generates about 3.2 billion pulses per second. While some processors can be pushed beyond their rated limits in a process known as overclocking, there is a point at which the clock speed can't increase any further.
As of March 2010, the record for processing power belongs to a Cray XT5 supercomputer named Jaguar. The Jaguar can process up to 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second [source: National Center for Computational Sciences].
Computer performance can also be assessed in terms of floating-point operations per second (flops). Today's desktop computers are equipped with processors capable of handling billions of floating-point operations per second, also known as gigaflops. Computers with multiple processors outperform single-processor machines, as each core can execute a certain number of calculations per second. Multi-core processors enhance computing power while consuming less energy [source: Intel].
Even the fastest computers can struggle with certain tasks, taking years to complete. For instance, finding the prime factors of an exceptionally large number is a difficult challenge. The computer must first determine the factors, then verify if those factors are prime numbers. When dealing with extremely large numbers, this becomes an arduous process that can take years for a computer to solve.
Future advancements in computing may make this task much easier. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could perform factorization tasks in parallel, quickly arriving at the most probable solution within moments. While quantum computers offer significant potential, they also face unique challenges and aren't universally applicable for all computational tasks. Nevertheless, they could drastically change our perspective on computational power.
