Throughout the years, the CPU (the brain of a computer) has been changing in a lot of aspects, such as the number of transistors that are in it, the lithography, the architecture that companies like Intel and AMD design to improve performance, capabilities of the CPUs, and many other things, but this tiny little piece of hardware has come to a point where the classic architecture doesn’t work as the old days.
We are used to thinking of a computer as many pieces of hardware working together and independently at the same time to accomplish certain tasks, as the Graphics card that works solving lots of geometrical and complex calculations that the Central Processing Unit (CPU) sends with the unique mission of showing images to the user, also physically a common desk computer hardware is easily recognizable, you can find the CPU, GPU, and the RAM, in a laptop its tinier but you can also recognize them, so this way of building computers has been predominant for many years until nowadays, but that is about to change and rapidly.
On the other side of the river, there is a technology called SOC which stands for «System on a Chip», that has been growing slowly and at the same time as the one mentioned before, this technology was intended to provide miniaturization because it puts all the same and big hardware of a computer inside a piece of metal that has a similar size of a common CPU, so this facilitates putting computers inside smaller devices as cellphones, tablets, microphones, earphones, and recently it is being used in laptops too with the help of ARM’s architecture.
But why this happened? Well, let’s say that the old way of building computers was becoming super inefficient, the space and the electricity that it takes to power a not-so-expensive common laptop or PC is ridiculous and let’s not talk about the heat and noise it produces when opening the word app, is uncomfortable.
For those who never heard of ARM, this is a technology designed by the company “ARM” that basically is more efficient and simpler than common CPU architectures such as the x86 designed by Intel. The main difference between ARM vs. x86 is that ARM favors simplicity and fast execution of single instructions. On the other hand, this architecture has to be fully compatible with the other components for it to be perfectly functional and optimized, however in certain tasks the x86 and other architectures will continue to be the best because of their raw power, but for most users as business people and students a computer with ARM chips will be more useful, less annoying, and they are very powerful for multitasking, if you don’t believe me, you can ask Apple that has been designing some amazing chips for its macs.
From this perspective, we can say that computers rely on ARM and SOC technologies, big tech companies started to develop their own Chips such as Apple, and other companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, and AMD are changing their technology slowly, but believe me when I tell you that sooner or later ARM and the SOC will be the kings powering computers, and most of the tech companies will have their own chips based on these technologies and architectures.
