There is always the promise of using more computing power for a single task. Your computer has multiple CPUs now, surely. Your video card has even more. Your computer is probably networked to a slew of other computers. But how do you write software to take advantage of that? There are many complex systems, of […]
Until the late 1990s, the concept of a 3D accelerator card was something generally associated with high-end workstations. Video games and kin would run happily on the CPU in one’s desktop system, with later extensions like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, etc. providing a significant performance boost for games that supported it. As 3D accelerator cards (colloquially […]
Over the decades there have been many denominations coined to classify computer systems, usually when they got used in different fields or technological improvements caused significant shifts. While the very first electronic computers were very limited and often not programmable, they would soon morph into something that we’d recognize today as a computer, starting with […]