Thursday, October 24, 2024

TV to CPU to GPU to NPU to Video Games

 TV to CPU to GPU to Video Games

Within 3 hours I covered all these on YouTube. 

All due to boredom created by our political commentators.

Everybody is trying to be good Samaritan including Naganada Kodituwakku.

I have moved from Radio Shack to Texas Instrument to Atari to Sinclair to  Commodore to even to Apple Globe.
 
I must say I was a Tech Guy all my life. 
Only restriction was things were not a available in Ceylon.
I went to England when explosive innovations were (Amstrad, Sinclair in UK and Texas Instruments, RadioShack, Atari and Commodore in USA) made and DOS based Video Games were popular.
Intel Pentium was not in existence.
RadiShack went into bankruptcy in 2017.
It's Tandy computer was one of my interests.  

After long lapse of interest due to my professional commitment come late nineteen's enter Intel Pentium and my first PC. 
Of course now, Good Bye to proprietary stuff including Microsoft to fully functional Linux Operating system without bonds to big companies.

I used to walk down the Tottenham Court Road in London from one end to the other end  for geeky gadgets. 

Other obsession was Medical Books. 
Foyles Bookshop was the tallest book shop. I bought even few books on DOS Operating System.

Let me dispensed with the TV
I did not have a TV in UK except Hospital TV. They very expensive. I bought t a second hand shop soiled Sony TV for a huge sum. Cannot remember how much I paid. 
There were no TVs in Ceylon, then.

Fast forward, apart from Cathode Ray Tubes (3 of which caught fire due to poor voltage in Ceylon)  to digital TVs to a cheap Chinese portable TVs, how these TVs work is of simple logic.
It is input and output scenario.

I was a user never bothered to see how they work mathematically. 
 
Assembling my first PC to NUC was easy progress.
Mother Board
CPU
Graphic Card
SRAM
DRAM 3 to DDR 4.

I won't go for DDR 5. It is waste of money for a new gadget.

Never bothered to work out how a CPUs and Graphic Cardd  work except, I knew CPU can work on binary (machine language) arithmetic (in future quantum logic) and simple program logic in combination with the RAM to booster it performamce
Ultimately all RAM or Random Access memory.
ROM is Read Only Memory from Floppy Disks, CDs, HDD and SATA.

CPU generates heat and thermal paste and heat sink are mandatory.

GPU was an enigma.
Guys who presented YouTube presentation, on CPU and GPU are not good teachers.
They could not simply explain either in binary logic or simple mathematics.

GPU works on computational magic and that is why ordinary Video Game cannot be like a Live TV Signal
Representing pixels in 3 dimensions is never accurate. 
To this one has to add movement and rendering.

What happens is there are large number of computations from GPU causing lot of heat in the system, environmentally not a healthy at all.
 
The information flow from GPU, to CPU to RAM has to be either parallel or serial and above all, synchronized to nano seconds.
If not a catastrophe.

Murphy's Law
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong when on this rapid advancement of technology after Coronavirus Pandemic recovery period.
There was shortage during the pandemic and glut after recovery.
The manufacturing guys had a dual problem of making good the loses and adjusting to the new market needs.

Moore's Law
There is rapid increase of new technology every two years but this law seems to have slowed down still more.

I did the right change for NUC discarding the old PC before the Coronavirus and bought bare bone NUC to which I could stuck old SATA disc. 
I had three of them.
Now new Mini PCs are coming with NVMe and .nvme and the lot which are expensive.
I am not a gamer and adding GPUs especially external NVidia has become a bottle neck and proprietary flame wars with Intel and AMD.
Not worth the expense.

DO NOT throw away your old computer.
DO NOT get involved with Graphic Card War.

Having said that there is a Mini PC with Camera on top which a classic innovation.
I have a separate piece here on that.


I see guys adding various old an new components and making a hash of it.
Fortunately voltages are very low and not electrocution of guys trying them. 
Then there is what is called static electrical that builds when assembling them.

I do not think there are books on how to assemble things.

NPU
NPU is a buss word.
It has no value on a PC.
The Chips are getting smaller and smaller especially in mobile or cellphone units. 

Their RAM is limited any cellphone less than 8GB RAM is not AI compatible. 
The graph cards are integrated and their load balance is limited.
In comes the NPU, where mathematical calculation in voltages are transferred to a separate portion to speed up activity and minimize the excess heating CPU and GPU. 

Thermal throttling come into play when video games are played whete every component of the mother board become active. It seems even the RAM chips need thermal protection. 
In the early days fans were enough to cool the GPU.

More power more heat is a simple physics principle.

Additionally battery capacity is the limiting factor unlike in a PC working on the wall current.
Bottom line is smaller the unit more NPU necessary to load balance.

The concept is borrowed from how neuron networks work in our brain.
Unlike a cellphone our brain has lot of redundant newworks and they work even when one is asleep.

Our brain does not work on batteries but on sugars and ATP.

Biological energy is very efficient and we cannot duplicate them let alone neuronal activity with an advanced computer.


It is far better to play a game in the open with some friends.
At least one can make friends but Video Games make unknown enemies in the Web.
Just like our YouTube guys fighting and presenting inaccurate political stuff to lite gullible audience.
I am bored and I want the election to be over with so that I can get on with my normal life.
I am currently working on three books.
Election is a huge distraction.

Now to facts. We are three dimensional beings with limited visual capacity. 
We can never see everything in the energy spectrum and nothing beyond limits of light travel. 
Infinity is not within our grasp.
We can use certain energy frequencies in the spectrum to even develop an atomic bomb.
But we do not know how to control our mind.
We are unable to harness dark energy and dark matter.
We can never visualize what in in the fourth or fifth dimensions.
What I am saying is, we have limited capacity and the moment we go beyond that capacity we destroy ourselves.
That is why I am against Artificial Intelligence.
Wars can destroy the entire planet in matter of 3 hours of insanity and it's living system which evolved over billions of years .
We are in that Insanity Zone.
 
That is why I am against video games.
Guys brought up on video games can push the button of a nuclear bomb in a frenzy or panic mode.

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