topic Re: Help needed in 8th grade project on CPU in Intel® Moderncode for Parallel Architectures

Help needed in 8th grade project on CPU

hdesu — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:48:29 GMT

My name is Hari. I am an 8th grade student. I attend a Magnet school. This year all 8th graders have to do a bigproject called Technology Exhibition. I am interested in the CPU as my topic. This Project requires a Primary source. The Primary source has to be a person who works with the topic related. I need to work with the person while
gathering the research through e-mail or mail. I know that Intel is #1 company in CPU market. So, I thought of asking for help regarding my project from Intel team.

If any body is interested tomentor me while doing my project, please let me know ASAP, If anyone ofresearch/tech team membercan be myPrimary source.

Thanking you,
Hari

Re: Help needed in 8th grade project on CPU

AaronTersteeg — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:39:39 GMT

Hari,
Thank you for reaching out to the team at Intel to help you with supporting your project. The team that manages this discussion form are experts in software more than the CPU hardware. So if you have really tough questions it might be better to talk to the hardware team. I can try to help answer a few questions for your project. What are you looking to do?

Aaron
aaron.c.tersteeg "at" intel.com

Re: Help needed in 8th grade project on CPU

hdesu — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 03:11:30 GMT

Hi Aaron,

Thank you for responding to my message and offering help. Could you please tell me how to reach the hardware team? Which forum belongs to the hardware team? If possible, can you suggest any of your collegues/friends who are working in hardware and who can help me in my project.

Before I can start my project, I need to choose 3 topics. The teacher chooses which one I get. My first choice is the CPU and it is most likely that I will get it. A primary sourcehelps answer quetions thatwedon't understand or know. This project requires a 10-12 page paper, a visual and acreative. The 8th grade gets 5 months to complete it.

Thanks and Regards,

Hari

Re: Help needed in 8th grade project on CPU

AaronTersteeg — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:45:16 GMT

Hari,
I have not been able to locate an engineer that would be well suited to assist you with your project. So let's start with me as your point of contact and I'll do my best to help or pull in people if I'm not the guy for your questions. How do you want to start?

Are you located in the USA or another part of the world?

Aaron Tersteeg

Re: Help needed in 8th grade project on CPU

hdesu — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:39:06 GMT

Hi Aaron,

Thank you for offering to help me. There are a few questions where I need your opinion in. Below are the questions:

1) What are the benefits/nonbenefits of the CPU.

2) How will the CPU evolve into future? What do you think is the next step to improving the CPU?

I amlocated inthe U.S. Please answer these question to the best of your ability. You don't need to contact anyone to help me on my project. These are the only 2 questions I need answered.

Thank you for your help,

Hari

Re: Help needed in 8th grade project on CPU

AaronTersteeg — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:16:28 GMT

1) What are the benefits/nonbenefits of the CPU.

The Central Processing Unit is designed to be a general purpose collection of integrated circuits designed to execute a wide variety of functions.

The primary benefit of a CPU is that it can perform many different processing tasks very effectively. For example it can be used to

People can run program on a CPU to write books, solve math problems, look at photos or make a video. The CPU is a jack of all trades and it is not singularly optimized to perform specific tasks. Your computer might have other chips in it that are designed to handle other tasks such as graphics and sounds processing.

But that is changing very quickly. With each new CPU that is released in includes new abilities such as video compression that make it a jack of all trades and very good at most.

Each function of the CPU is accessed through its instruction set; this is a list of what the processor can do. Software developers write programs that access the instructions to get the processor to do things. Instruction might be add, subtract, multiple, divide or compare two things. The list of instructions is very long and new instructions are being added on a regular basis.

2) How will the CPU evolve into future? What do you think is the next step to improving the CPU?

The CPU is getting faster, smaller and more powerful with every new release. CPUs have been mostly single core for over 35 years but now main stream CPUs have two cores. It appears that the idea of putting more cores into a CPU is catching on and I anticipate that future CPUs will include more than two cores. The optimal number of cores is still open to debate but software developers are starting to write their software to run on many cores, this is called Parallel Programming.

There are a many ideas in the works for making improvements to the CPU. As engineers figure out how to use integrated circuits to solve problems they build new instructions into the CPU.