Computing Power:
What distinguishes a supercomputer as such? Can it defend the rights of the innocent or leap large buildings in a single bound? The reality is a little less dramatic. Complex calculations can be completed very quickly by supercomputers.
Apparently, that is the key to computer power. Everything depends on how quickly a machine can do an operation. A computer’s operations can be reduced to math. Any command you provide is translated by your computer’s processor into a set of mathematical equations. Faster processors are better at performing extremely difficult calculations and can perform more calculations per second than slower ones.
The CPU of your computer contains an electronic clock. A series of electrical pulses must be produced by the clock at regular intervals. This makes it possible for the computer to synchronize all of its parts and controls how quickly it can retrieve data from memory and carry out calculations.
Clock speed is what is meant when you mention how many gigahertz your processor has. The figure represents the number of electrical pulses that your CPU emits each second. A CPU operating at 3.2 gigahertz generates about 3.2 billion pulses per second. While certain CPUs can be overclocked to operate at rates above their stated limits, ultimately a clock will reach its maximum speed and cannot be increased.
Flops, commonly known as floating-point operations per second, are another way to quantify computer performance. A desktop computer’s processor today can perform gigaflops or billions of floating-point operations per second. The ability of each processor core to do a specific amount of calculations per second gives computers with many processors an edge over those with a single processor. The computing power of multiple-core computers increases while using less electricity. (Reference: Intel)
Even powerful computers might need years to do a task. For the majority of computers, it is challenging to find the two prime factors of an extremely large number. The computer must first identify an enormous number’s factors. The next step is for the computer to decide whether the factors are prime numbers. This is a tedious task for very large numbers. Computers can take years to perform calculations.
Such a task might be fairly straightforward for future computers. The most likely solution might be given in a matter of seconds by a working quantum computer with enough processing power to do parallel calculations on various factors. Quantum computers, however, present unique difficulties and wouldn’t be appropriate for all computing workloads, but they might change the way we perceive computing capacity.