It’s not all about the computer’s processor when it comes to speed, particularly in our modern computers. There are many components and parts of the computer that have a lot to contribute to the overall speed and performance of the modern computer. Here are a few of the most impactful developments over the last decade or so that have made computing what it is today.
Solid State Drives
Ever since we left the
punch card behind, storage in computers has traditionally relied
on magnetic technology.
A physically moving and spinning disk, whether fixed inside the computer or
removable via a disk drive,uses a special platter with a magnetic coating anda
special head that physically has to move over this disc surface both to read
and write data. This means that to read and write this data, it has to be
physically located by the computer on the disk before it can be processed.
Flash memory changed
this by creating a memory that doesn’t have any moving parts and is instead
instantly accessible. The flash drive was perhaps the first mainstream use of
this technology, but it didn’t take long for computer hard drives to adopt it
in the form of a solid-state drives. While a traditional spinning hard drive
can read data at between 30 and 150MB a second, the fastest SSDs have no trouble
reaching upwards of 3000MB/s, a significant difference indeed.
PCI-Express
To understand why PCI-Express is such a fundamental
improvement in speed,
we need to understand how expansion card slots in computers interface with the
processor.
Traditionally, PCI
slots interfaced with a special controller on the mainboard called the
southbridge. This, in turn, sent all its information to the northbridge
controller, which was responsible for interfacing with the processor and
memory. PCI-Express made a subtle but important change to this – it allowed the
expansion slots to interface directly with the northbridge, and thus directly
with the processor and memory. Today’s incredible display cards that power RTX Gaming PCs simply wouldn’t be possible without the
PCI-Express slot.
USB3
While perhaps not
directly related to the overall speed of the computer, USB3 and its newer variations took the humble USB port and revolutionized
what it’s capable of. Not only was the jump in speed of USB3 significant,
allowing transfer speeds of up to 5Gbit/s (10 times faster than USB2), but it
also enabled technologies like video output. Laptops can have multiple screens and
power delivery so docking stations can send power to the computer to avoid
having to fiddle with lots of cables and connections every time you move your
laptops. These sorts of conveniences simply weren’t possible using the older
USB technologies.
We owe a lot of our
success in business and entertainment to the wizards who constantly invent and
evolve the technologies that power our computers and peripherals. No doubt in
the coming years we’ll see the technologies we described here replaced with
even better and faster versions or options. Such is the way that computing
technology works and evolves.
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