The 6th Gen Intel Core i7-6500U processor gives the Razer Blade Stealth 2.5GHz of processing power and Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.1GHz.
Above is a picture with a quote taken from Razer – introducing it’s latest laptop. After reading that, you’ll probably fall into one of the two categories: “What on earth does this mean,” or “Razer is obviously ripping people off.”
It intrigues me that most people still know so little about what they’re using at the palm of their hands on a daily basis. Yet it is understandable as to why this is, the jargons that are supposed to help customers make better choices have become the barriers themselves.
Does it matter if you laptop can split in half?
And some of the biggest companies (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) intentionally leave out the specifications of their products. Imagine buying a furnished house without knowing the capacity of the washing machine.
Fret not! Hopefully, this “guide” will help you up your game so you won’t need to waste hours of your life deciding on a new computer. Some fun stuff will be lying around so to not bore you.
CPU: Central Processing Unit, the brain of the computer, responsible for processing things in your computer, the speed is measured in Gigahertz (GHz). Below is a video of Steve Jobs holding a CPU.
You might also have heard of cores. I will leave that to one of my favourite tech YouTuber to explain, take it away MKBHD:
Fun fact: The evolution of CPU (sounds weird I know), was governed by the Moore’s Law until recently, this means that we will only see a significantly faster CPU every two years.
GPU: Graphic Processing Unit, the visual cortex of the computer, responsible for processing visual information. Things that are graphic intensive include videos, games and 3D modelling.
Fun watch: embedded is a video of the legendary Mythbusters explaining the difference between CPU and GPU, though it is old, it is still very relevant now.
HDD/SSD: Hard Disk Drive/Solid State Drive, governing the long term memories of the computer. Measured in Gigabytes (GB) or Terabyes (TB). Trust me on this when I say you don’t want to have a small capacity (<250GB), don’t say I didn’t warn you when you have to start deleting adorable cat pics just because you didn’t listen to me.
Fun read: Scientists have found another use for helium, which is to fill them in HDD to give HDD a higher capacity!
RAM: Random Access Memory, the short term memory of the computer. They will help store tidbits used for short time like booting up a computer or the amount of tabs you have on your browser (seriously, don’t blame the computer for being slow when you have 30 tabs opened all at the same time). <– Funny Joke
To sum up: Everything is better with higher numbers.
And that’s it for today! Maybe I’ll expand on each aspect in the future blog posts, but until then!
Ivan
