Oclure

Oclure t1_jefsjix wrote

They often do work without batteries, they are esentialy low quality plastic versions of the old school Victrola record players that rely on the record needle directly vibrating a diaphragm to make sound and thus need no power just somthing to spin the record which could be a pull string in a doll like this.

The same concept is used on those old animal sound spining toys, except those had multiple tracks arranged in concentric spirals on the record. When you pointed the arrow at the animal whose sound you wanted to hear you were actualy lining the record up so the needle would fall into the groove for the right track.

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Oclure t1_j9vn6d5 wrote

I'd also add that while we can signify binary with high and low voltages the same doesn't work as well for trinary as you would need a mid voltage.

One likley issue here is that while it may seem like electrical states change instantly they actualy take a tiny amount of time as voltage drains from a high representing a 1 to a low representing a 0. Now add a mid voltage between 1 and 0 and the voltage has to actualy pass this mid state on its way from a 1 to a 0 meaning that if you read the systems state at the wrong time you could easily mistake a voltage in transition for one that's intended to be this mid voltage. . This is actualy a common issue with overclocking as the clock rate outruns the ability for the voltage states to change, however in the case of a binary system it's possible to stabilize the system again with a bit of overvolting at the expense of producing more heat.

So unfortunately, using our traditional system of representing two states becomes a lot less stable when adding a third state, and making a stable system that can represent trinary would likely add a lot of complexity.

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Oclure t1_j6lrq3d wrote

The cpu is a handful of college math majors, they are skilled in handling a wide variety of problems and in general are much faster than most at doing those calculations. The gpu is a gymnasium full of 5th gradrs, don't ask them to handle advanced calculus but give them a few thousand basic algebra questions and that mob of students is going to be done way faster than those couple of grad students.

Less eli5 : In general the cpu is deciding what happens on the screen and the gpu is in charge of saying that that looks like. As the one takes a lot of varied calculations and the other is more specialized at just drawing shaped and applying textures to them, but doing it with a ton of cores at once.

When it comes to games the cpu is running the game itself, saying what entity is where and where things are headed. The gpu is constantly trying to draw what the cpu says is there, it loads all the physical assets into its own memory, does all the calculations for how the scene is lit and dumps its result onto the screen. Once it's done with all of that it asks the cpu where everything is again and starts all over.

The cpu contains only a handful or so very powerfull general purpose core to do the work, a modern gpu on the other hand has thousands of less flexible dumber cores that can brute force their way through all the work it takes to generate frame in a modern game. Plus having much faster memory on board the card itself helps when gpu is constantly referencing large texture files and storing information dealing with the current frame its working on.

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