Computer Parts Explained: Like a Kitchen
In a world where more is deemed better — more success, more money, more followers, more of more — choosing less seems highly contradicting.
Over the past year, I’ve proudly identified as a minimalist. Most of my family and acquaintances dig it, and some of them tease me about it. To some, having under 100 pieces of clothing or a shower that contains only one type of soap and one shampoo is deemed impossible (especially from the women in my life) or a sign of light obsessive-compulsiveness.
Minimalism is a movement that has skyrocketed in the past few years, and it has guided thousands of people towards pursuing purpose-driven lives. Everyone has a different way of living this out, and that is one of the things that makes it so great.
I discovered that by shaving off excess in my life, I got closer to true self-love and acceptance. By removing the things that cloud my vision of the life I wish to create, that consume my time and swallow my savings, I found the space to dig deeper into myself and my aspirations.
Minimalism allows you to remove the excess in your life in order to focus on things that provide true value — happiness, freedom, and fulfillment. — The Minimalists
Simplification spawns intentionality, and intentionality inspires purpose — and anyone can benefit from simplicity regardless of ethnic background or socioeconomic status.
What is a CPU? What is Ram? I'd like to discuss these things, but like a kitchen!
Clockspeeds, graphics cards, CPUs, "Ice Lake" this, "Ryzen" that. It can all be very confusing, and I'm a fan of fun answers. So let's take a moment to make it fun by talking about some various parts of a computer like it's a kitchen. Parents love this.
In a kitchen you have a counter space. There are drawers, cupboards, various tools items, groceries, and of course, a chef!
The Central Processing Unit (CPU): The Chef
This is the brain and operator of the computer. The biggest brands are Intel, AMD, Snapdragon, and Apple. They have their shares of differences, but the main point is that these are the chefs of the kitchen. Everything else is a space and tool. It's up to you, the chef, to make good work of it.
In a kitchen there are tasks. Chop vegetables, wash produce, grab items from the drawers, or cook a dish. Some dishes can be baked oven, some dishes are like a stir fry. It's up to the chef to do well with ingredients to create good dishes. Let's discuss some parts of the CPU.
Clock Speed: The Chef Speed
This is how fast the chef is. This is how fast you can chop up an onion. Sometimes one good chef can do more than 3 slow ones.
Number of Cores: The Number of Chefs
It doesn't necessarily make everything faster. 12 chefs don't make 1 omelette faster, but it definitely helps with making a full breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, and bless you pancakes.
When someone says a piece of software is optimized for multiple cores, it's like saying that a food plan has been made to optimize for multiple chefs.
Let's say we're serving 30 omelettes. Each omelette has 3 stages: beat and scramble, cook, and wash dishes.
It's not ideal for each chef will do one omelette at a time. What we need is a better process to optimize cooking 30 omelettes. We can delegate tasks, so one chef cooks and the other one cleans. We can also maybe make 30 omelettes all at once and then separate them to different dishes. Optimizing for cores is a systematic consideration by the software to process the work in a way that makes best use of what is available.
The CPU Cache
You may have heard of this as L1, L2 and L3 caches. What does this mean? These caches are various storage locations immediately available to the CPU to work with. This is like the chef's apron and what's in his hands.
He may have a knife and cutting board right in front of him, and a spatula in his apron pocket. Point is, it's right there in front of him. He can do everything with those tools. There's no opening drawers or opening refridgerators. What is within his hands reach is his cache.
Ram: Countertop Space
There's no point having 5 world class chefs in one tiny kitchen. Ram is like countertop space. It's space to work on. The more countertop space you have, the more stations you can quickly jump from. If you don't have enough space, you need to take a second to make space. I'll bet you've heard that before while talking about computers!
Hard Disk: The Pantry
You store things here. It's not fast, and it's not great for doing work, but you can put a lot in there. It best functions as storage to keep stuff that you'll bring to the ram to work with. For a kitchen this is like the pantry. It's in the other room. It's huge and it takes you a few seconds to walk over there and grab another box of risotto rice and walk back.
Sometimes you may have trouble finding what you're looking for. Indexing is like having a nice organized pantry where you don't waste time looking for what you need.
So there you have it! Some basic parts of a computer explained like a kitchen. I had fun writing this. I hope you enjoyed it!
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Words & Photos by Mathilde.