Computer Hardware and Software
Hardware and software are equal parts of a computer, hardware including physical keyboards and monitors and software including non-physical programs.
CPU is the brain of a computer and it fetches data from memory and runs calculations and reasoning at high-speed. Other critical hardware include RAM, hard drives and the motherboard.
Processor
Its CPU (central processing unit) is your computer’s processor. This CPU is made up of a complex silicon rectangle, coated with hundreds of metal pins and reads and executes instructions to all hardware in your PC.
Computer processors perform the simple arithmetic and logic functions that make programs work. They do things such as load an instruction, read it, do it, and save the result – all billions of times a second, and machines calculate faster than ever before.
CPUs nowadays have an arithmetic and logic unit which performs simple arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, or logic comparisons such as comparing two sets of data items to each other.
Memory
It encompasses all the physical hardware, which is used to enter data and return data — motherboard, central processing unit (CPU), storage devices, disk drives. Laptops include the majority of this hardware in a light, carry-on box that can go with you everywhere.
Computers store data that they must get access to quickly in memory. Memory can be volatile or nonvolatile, with the latter being secondary storage that doesn’t lose its information when the system is shut off.
Software requires hardware of some kind to function. Video games, for example, require a CPU (to execute digital code), RAM (to store data), and a graphics card (to represent pictures on a monitor screen).
Hard Drive
Disks are nonvolatile information storage devices, they hold billions of bits of data in a ready to be accessed form for future reference. Computers come with drives, and VCRs use them to record digital content.
Disk Drives: disk drives are fabricated from platters coated in magnetic material that spin fast when they are rapidly swept by a read/write head of a mobile arm. These read/write heads magnetise little dots on each disk surface to detect the magnetic orientation of read or write sectors: clusters are built to be easy to access and store.
-Hard disk drives hold the operating system and individual applications inside so they don’t have to be loaded off discs when the computer starts. They even maintain stored information; unlike RAM-based storage, hard drives don’t lose their data when they go offline.
Motherboard
A motherboard is the beating heart of a computer case and connects all the active parts to it. It also includes the CPU and random access memory, and can accept expansion cards such as graphics, sound, and networking card.
Each motherboard will be a little bit different, but they all look alike. They typically have hard plastic bodies that carry copper or aluminum lines running through them that form circuits where it runs. A CPU socket holds the microprocessor; RAM slots contain varying size and speed RAM chips. Other than that, a motherboard’s ports contain storage connections to attach hard disk drives (HDDs, SSDs) for data storage, and front panel connectors to attach external keyboards and mice.
Graphics Processing Unit
GPUs convert 2D and 3D graphics into signals which we are able to view on monitors. GPUs are most notably associated with the ultra-realistic image we observe in video and video games today, but GPUs also help in applications such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
As an architecture, GPUs do well at both data parallelism (doing the same task at multiple datapoints) and task parallelism (doing different tasks on different data points at the same time). They also have large memory bandwidths that let you access a lot of large data sets rapidly — this is very valuable in AI applications.
GPUs are extensively used in several areas of AI science and programming. They can be applied to AI training/inference/generative AI simulations as well as weather prediction simulations and cryptocurrency mining. GPUs are also used a lot in autonomous vehicles to sort through vast quantities of sensor information fast and making rapid decisions to navigate and avoid in an unimpeded manner.