In recent years, you must have heard such a word in many news reports, and that is computing power. What exactly does computing power represent?What are the manifestations of computing power?Today's two-minute popular science will take you to understand computing power:
The concept of computing power is easy to understand, that is, computing power, whether it is a computer or a human brain, it has computing power. When we usually do oral arithmetic, the brain works as a computing engine, but this computing power is a bit low, and when we encounter some complex calculations, we need to use tools to improve computing power, such as abacus is an early computing power tool.
But after all, tools are only auxiliary, and the calculation process still depends on the brain, until the advent of computers.
From the early 17th century to the middle of the 20th century, mankind experienced almost 300 years of mechanical computer age, during which the Pascal calculator, Leibniz multiplier, Babbage difference machine, etc., were invented to improve computing power, but the mechanical efficiency was relatively low.
Later, thanks to the invention of vacuum tubes (tubes), the world's first general-purpose electronic computer ENIAC was born in 1946, and computing power made a qualitative leap.
How big is this leap?It can perform 5,000 operations per second, although it is nothing compared with the current VLSI hundreds of millions of times per second, but it marks the official entry of human computing power into the digital electronic age.
The subsequent development is obvious to all: the emergence of semiconductor technology, the birth of integrated circuit computers, chips are getting smaller and smaller, the performance is getting stronger and stronger, the corresponding computer is getting smaller and smaller, and the computing power is getting higher and higher.
It can be said that the development of computing power is the development of computers, but the upper limit of computing power can break through the limitations of a single computer.
After entering the 21st century, people have found that no matter how powerful a computer's performance is, the computing power is always limited, and the pursuit of an overly powerful computer is not worth the cost.
As a result, we can integrate the CPU, GPU, memory, graphics card and other resources of multiple servers to form a computing resource pool, and distribute computing power to users or enterprises who need it through reasonable allocation, which is cloud computing.
Under cloud computing, the data center has become the main carrier of computing power, and in the data center, the type of computing power is also changing, not only the performance is improving, but the use will be more subdivided, there are general computing power that can perform various tasks, and there are special computing power that is very outstanding under specific tasks;There are parts responsible for basic computing and high-performance computing, and the application fields of computing power are becoming more and more extensive, and the configuration methods are becoming more and more abundant.
Computing power is one of the foundations of artificial intelligence, but also the core productivity of the current era, in addition to the above-mentioned general computing power, there are intelligent computing centers, supercomputing centers, quantum computing, photonic computing, etc., with the further development of technology, a new round of computing power revolution will also bring greater changes to life.