The Tech Blog

Well actually the title of this blog is a misnomer because what I want to do is help demistify the technical aspects of memory, processor size, motherboard speed and front-side bus speed.

Caveat:
This post may not be correct from a purely technical aspect but serves it’s purpose in explaining the data flow and the options available.

In another post elsewhere on this site I wrote about computer specifications and it struck me that there are a lot of people who might be confused about the technical aspects when it comes to choosing memory, processor, motherboards etc so I thought it would be fun to write about these in a completely non-technical manner so everyone can understand it.

Although this article is primarily for those building their own PC it should prove valuable to those buying a ready made PC. I do not intend to cover every single aspect of the PC just the ones that seem most confusing to most people.
Having said that, if anyone has a specific problem with understanding how a particular part of a PC works or “should I get A instead of B then I’ll do my best to help.

One of the most critical ‘performance’ aspects of a PC is how quickly the computer can read a set of instructions, carry those instructions out and move onto the next task at hand.

Our Memory
For the purposes of this non technical guide, I want you to imagine in your minds eye a funnel attached to the wall about half way up the wall. This is going to be our ‘memory’.

The Processor
As the pipe travels down the wall, about half way down, we are going to have a sealed box with our pipe going into the top and exiting out of the bottom. This will be our processor.

The pipe continues down the wall until it stops just above a big see-through bucket on the floor.

Here is the specifications for our water computer;
Funnel - (memory)
Pipe - (motherboard)
Connection box (processor)
Bucket - (graphics card and monitor) an infinitely big see through bucket so you can see the results of your ‘instructions’.

Now we have the basis of our ‘water’ computer. We are going to feed it instructions into the funnel (water) and see how quickly we can get the water from the funnel to the bucket (executing the instructions).
So, now we are set to go.

We will assume that in it’s current configuration we can throw 500ml of water into the funnel and it will reach the top of the funnel.
It will then travel down the pipe into the junction box and then down the rest of the pipe and into the bucket.
In our ‘water computer’ this is going to take 1 second.

Congratulations, we have just built a water computer capable of carrying out 500 instructions (ml) of instruction per second woohoo!

Now we want to run a pretty complicated program. This is going to need more memory to hold the instructions but we are going to try it anyway and see what happens.
So now to throw in 1 litre of water (1000 millilitres).
Oops, we crashed!
Our funnel can only take half that amount (of instructions - water) before it spills over the top!
What can we do?
Time for a ‘memory’ upgrade me thinks!
We have two options open to us, either will work but doing both is best. We can increase the size of the memory - increase the size of the funnel or;
we can increase the ’speed’ of the memory by using a funnel with a wider neck so the ‘flow’ is not as restricted.
In an ideal world we would want to do both so that we can get as close to perfection as possible.

Perfection in this case is a funnel that has a neck width the same as the top of the funnel so there is absolutely no restrictions to the flow of water.

No doubt there are a few speed freaks reading this saying, no, no, faster is better, faster is better!
Well actually, faster is not always better.
Why?
Well consider this…
If your funnel neck is wider than the top of the funnel, you actually have an inverted funnel - a funnel that is upside down!
You still have a bottle-neck but now you cannot get the instruction INTO the funnel fast enough!

With a litre of water we can get that through the funnel now in half a second BUT the pipe will only allow us to have 1 litre of water per second so we have what is called a “bottle neck” - a miss-match between what all the components of our water computer are capable of.
This limitation of our pipe (motherboard) is called the Front Side Bus speed (FS. We can a chuck huge water into our funnel (pass instrictions to the memory) and get rid of it at a great rate of knots (high memory speed) but the pipe diameter (motherboard front side bus speed) is holding us up.

Part 2 coming shortly