15 Best Ultrawide Monitors - November 2023

Best Ultrawide Monitors – Ultimate Buying Guide

Finding the best ultrawide monitor may seem daunting, but we’ve made it much easier with this user-friendly buying guide. The increase in demand for online content and larger displays on essentially every device, has understandably led to the popularity of ultrawide monitors. Ultrawide (widescreen) monitors offer the ultimate in office productivity, allowing you to place two or more full-screen windows side-by-side without the need for a multi-monitor setup. You could literally view your daily emails on one side of the screen, while streaming the latest business news on the other. They are absolutely a game changer with getting more done.

Small business owners, stock traders, and designers & developers love ultrawide monitors, since they tend to multi-task on numerous separate windows of visual graphics and/or expansive lines of code.

Ultrawide monitors can be utilized for streaming content and gaming as well. It will transform your office space into a widescreen entertainment hub. Your favorite movies, tv shows, and pc games will all be considerably enhanced by the increased field of view.

Table Of Contents

Best Ultrawide Monitors – Ultimate Buying Guide
Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 – Quick List
Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 – Reviews
1. LG 34WN80C-B WQHD – Best Overall
2. Samsung Business CH890 – Best for Work
3. LG 29UM59-A FHD – Best Budget
4. Sceptre C355W-3440UN – Best Sceptre Gaming
5. Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 – Best Samsung Gaming
6. VIOTEK GNV29CB – Best Viotek Gaming
7. Dell S3422DWG – Best Dell Gaming
8. Samsung SJ55W – Best Samsung Multi-Purpose
9. Sceptre C305W-2560UN – Best Sceptre Multi-Purpose
10. BenQ MOBIUZ EX3415R – Best BenQ
11. ViewSonic VX3418-2KPC – Best ViewSonic
12. Philips 343E2E – Best Philips
13. AOC CQ34G2 – Best AOC
14. Sceptre C305B-200UN1 – Best Sceptre
15. LG 29WP60G-B – Best LG

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 – Quick List

LG 34WN80C-B WQHD – Best Overall
Samsung Business CH890 – Best for Work
LG 29UM59-A – Best Budget
Sceptre C355W-3440UN – Best Sceptre Gaming
Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 – Best Samsung Gaming
Viotek GNV29CB – Best Viotek Gaming
Dell S3422DWG – Best Dell Gaming
Samsung SJ55W – Best Samsung Multi-Purpose
Sceptre C305W-2560UN – Best Sceptre Multi-Purpose
BenQ MOBIUZ EX3415R – Best BenQ
ViewSonic VX3418-2KPC – Best ViewSonic
Philips 343E2E – Best Philips
AOC CQ34G2 – Best AOC
Sceptre C305B-200UN1 – Best Sceptre
LG 29WP60G-B – Best LG

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 – Reviews

1. LG 34WN80C-B WQHD – Best Overall

For many the LG 34WN80C-B checks all the right boxes with an emphatic yes. The LG 34WN80C-B satisfies those looking for a high quality ultrawide monitor, with a substantial screen size, comes from a well known brand, and displays high resolution content at a reasonable price.

This monitor can be utilized for virtually anything you throw at it from word processing docs, and editing videos, to fast paced action pc games. Essentially every application is enhanced with the larger screen.

The LG 34WN80C-B excels at providing something for everyone. Especially work or design related projects and tasks where it’s helpful to compare files or images side by side.

2. Samsung Business CH890 – Best for Work

The Samsung CH890 has a substantial 34 inch display that means business. Samsung is literally one of the world’s leaders in creating the highest quality displays. So it’s no surprise that their business line of ultrawide monitors are the best for work.

Productivity is a breeze with this monitor, it’s as if you have 2 to 3 monitors in one and you can subsequently multitask at the highest possible level.

3. LG 29UM59-A FHD – Best Budget

Budget is at the forefront of many minds when purchasing items online. The LG 29UM59-A addresses that specifically for those who want a high quality ultrawide at a low price. It’s 29 inch widescreen is not the largest ultrawide on the market (or within this list), but it is considerably larger than the average monitor size of 19 to 24 inches.

It handles everything it should from microsoft word documents, browsing online, video content, and to pc games. The screen is still big enough to multi-task and enjoy content in widescreen mode.

4. Sceptre C355W-3440UN – Best Sceptre Gaming

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 (Best Sceptre Gaming)

The Sceptre C355W-3440UN gives everything that gamers want (or should want) for a ultrawide monitor: a large widescreen, that’s curved, has high resolution, a fast refresh rate, and all at an affordable price. It’s a gaming beast.

You can easily switch from games to other entertainment such as watching youtube or netflix in widescreen glory without missing a beat.

5. Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 – Best Samsung Gaming

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The best just got a whole lot better thanks to the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9. The original Odyssey G9 was already Samsung’s tip-top gaming monitor. Now it’s been given the one upgrade it really needed. Yup, the Neo G9 is packing a mini-LED backlight.

The previous Samsung Odyssey G9 had plenty going for it, not least a monster 49-inch 32:9 aspect panel with an extreme wrap-around curve and the minor matter of some seven million pixels thanks to a native resolution of 5,120 by 1,440. It was also good for an eye-popping 1,000 nits, while VA panel technology delivered static contrast of 2,500:1. Oh, and the original G9’s pixel response was rated at 1ms grey-to-grey, an achievement normally only attained by IPS and TN panels.

As for features like 240Hz refresh and adaptive sync, they’re surely givens on this class of uber high-end gaming display. Of course, all that sweet technology was wrapped in some suitably expensive, showbiz threads, including the kind of chassis and stand only a megabucks outfit like Samsung can engineer. By several measures, the original G9 was positively peerless.

Well, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has carried over all that good stuff. Out of the box, it looks identical to the old G9. Deep inside, however, the original G9’s single most obvious shortcoming has been addressed. And then some. The first G9 delivered its theoretically impressive HDR 1000 performance courtesy of a rudimentary edge-lit backlight. Yes, it was very powerful. Sure, it had local dimming zones. But only 10 of them. In reality, that advertised local dimming was a bit of a con. Instead, the G9 got by on account of the excellent inherent contrast of its VA panel.

The Neo G9 still has a fantastic VA panel. But its new backlight doesn’t just have full-array rather than edge-lit dimming. It packs a cutting-edge mini-LED tech with no fewer than 2,048 zones. This thing is several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than before. As if that wasn’t enough, the Neo G9’s peak brightness has doubled to a retina-wrecking 2,000 nits. What a beast.

6. VIOTEK GNV29CB – Best Viotek Gaming

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The Viotek GNV29CB has an incredibly powerful mix of features primed for gaming. The 29 inch curved screen pulls you into the action and no opponent is hidden from view. The blazing 120Hz refresh rate gives you a competitive edge while the G-SYNC and FreeSync keeps everything smooth and consistent.

7. Dell S3422DWG – Best Dell Gaming

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 (Best Dell Gaming)

The Dell S3422DWG has a massive 34 inch curved display that will make just about every other gamer envious. The 144Hz refresh rate easily competes with the best monitors currently available. To top it all off, you can enjoy every detail and have pixel-perfect precision thanks to the WQHD 3440 x 1440 resolution.

8. Samsung SJ55W – Best Samsung Multi-Purpose

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 (Best Samsung Multi-Purpose)

The Samsung SJ55W is great for those looking for an ultrawide monitor that excels at productivity as well as gaming. The huge 34 inch screen is pretty much like having 2 monitors in 1. You can multi-task with multiple applications to your heart’s content. And when you’ve completed all your work you can kick back and enjoy all your favorite streaming content or dive into just about any pc game.

9. Sceptre C305W-2560UN – Best Sceptre Multi-Purpose

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 (Best Sceptre Multi-Purpose)

The Sceptre C305W-2560UN can pretty much do it all, including being ultra affordable. The gorgeous curved 30 inch display is not too small, not too big for just about every computer setup. The built-in speakers save precious desktop space, and are perfect for streaming and pc games. There’s plenty of gaming and eye health tech to keep you in the action for multiple hours. If you’re on a budget and want a monitor that can handle just about anything, this is it.

10. BenQ MOBIUZ EX3415R – Best BenQ

BenQ is a pioneer in 3d display technologies, which makes it perfect for the ultimate, 34 inch gaming monitor.

11. ViewSonic VX3418-2KPC – Best ViewSonic

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 (Best ViewSonic)

ViewSonic is well known in the design world for their incredible color coverage and pixel perfect details. Combine the artistic attention to detail with impressive gaming specs, and you have one heck of a display.

12. Philips 343E2E – Best Philips

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 (Best Philips)

Similar to ViewSonic, Philips is world renowned specifically for their amazing color coverage. This makes it ideal for graphic designers, photographers, and video editors to name a new. Just imagine yourself working on a design project with a massive 34 inch screen with 123% sRGB and 109% NTSC. It even has decent gaming specs as well.

13. AOC CQ34G2 – Best AOC

AOC typically provides monitors with some of the most competitive prices in the market. The AOC CQ34G2 is a perfect example of that. It has a 34 inch curved display with a 1ms response time and 75Hz refresh rate.

14. Sceptre C305B-200UN1 – Best Sceptre

Best Ultrawide Monitor 2023 (Best Sceptre)

Another company that focuses on affordability is Sceptre. The Sceptre C305B-200UN1 combines the highly desirable traits of high-end features & specs, with a low price.

15. LG 29WP60G-B – Best LG

The LG 29WP60G-B is a highly versatile and budget-friendly monitor that appeals to a large audience.

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The performance of a monitor is measured by the following parameters:

Luminance is measured in candelas per square meter (cd/m² also called a Nit).
Color depth is measured in bits per primary color or bits for all colors.
Gamut is measured as coordinates in the CIE 1931 color space. The names sRGB or AdobeRGB are shorthand notations.
Aspect ratio is the ratio of the horizontal length to the vertical length. Monitors usually have the aspect ratio 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 or 16:9.
Viewable image size is usually measured diagonally, but the actual widths and heights are more informative since they are not affected by the aspect ratio in the same way. For CRTs, the viewable size is typically 1 in (25 mm) smaller than the tube itself.
Display resolution is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. For a given display size, maximum resolution is limited by dot pitch.
Dot pitch is the distance between sub-pixels of the same color in millimeters. In general, the smaller the dot pitch, the sharper the picture will appear.
Refresh rate is the number of times in a second that a display is illuminated. Maximum refresh rate is limited by response time.
Response time is the time a pixel in a monitor takes to go from active (white) to inactive (black) and back to active (white) again, measured in milliseconds. Lower numbers mean faster transitions and therefore fewer visible image artifacts.
Contrast ratio is the ratio of the luminosity of the brightest color (white) to that of the darkest color (black) that the monitor is capable of producing.
Power consumption is measured in watts.
Delta-E: Color accuracy is measured in delta-E; the lower the delta-E, the more accurate the color representation. A delta-E of below 1 is imperceptible to the human eye. Delta-Es of 2 to 4 are considered good and require a sensitive eye to spot the difference.
Viewing angle is the maximum angle at which images on the monitor can be viewed, without excessive degradation to the image. It is measured in degrees horizontally and vertically.best ultrawide monitor 2021
On two-dimensional display devices such as computer monitors the display size or view able image size is the actual amount of screen space that is available to display a picture, video or working space, without obstruction from the case or other aspects of the unit’s design. The main measurements for display devices are: width, height, total area and the diagonal.

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Either computer could be connected to the antenna terminals of an ordinary color TV set or used with a purpose-made CRT color monitor for optimum resolution and color quality.

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Lagging several years behind, in 1981 IBM introduced the Color Graphics Adapter, which could display four colors with a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels, or it could produce 640 x 200 pixels with two colors. In 1984 IBM introduced the Enhanced Graphics Adapter which was capable of producing 16 colors and had a resolution of 640 x 350.^[2]

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By the end of the 1980s color CRT monitors that could clearly display 1024 x 768 pixels were widely available and increasingly affordable.

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During the following decade, maximum display resolutions gradually increased and prices continued to fall. CRT technology remained dominant in the PC monitor market into the new millennium partly because it was cheaper to produce and offered to view angles close to 180 degrees.^[3]

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CRTs still offer some image quality advantages^{[clarification needed]} over LCDs but improvements to the latter have made them much less obvious.

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The dynamic range of early LCD panels was very poor, and although text and other motionless graphics were sharper than on a CRT, an LCD characteristic known as pixel lag caused moving graphics to appear noticeably smeared and blurry.

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A liquid crystal display (LCD) computer monitor

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A cathode-ray tube (CRT) computer monitor.

Early computers were only conceived as calculating devices. Since ancient times, simple manual devices like the abacus aided people in doing calculations. Early in the Industrial Revolution, some mechanical devices were built to automate long tedious tasks, such as guiding patterns for looms. More sophisticated electrical machines did specialized analog calculations in the early 20th century. The first digital electronic calculating machines were developed during World War II. The first semiconductor transistors in the late 1940s were followed by the silicon-based MOSFET (MOS transistor) and monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip technologies in the late 1950s, leading to the microprocessor and the microcomputer revolution in the 1970s. The speed, power and versatility of computers have been increasing dramatically ever since then, with MOS transistor counts increasing at a rapid pace (as predicted by Moore’s law), leading to the Digital Revolution during the late 20th to early 21st centuries.

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Conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element, typically a central processing unit (CPU) in the form of a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) microprocessor, along with some type of computer memory, typically MOS semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing and control unit can change the order of operations in response to stored information. Peripheral devices include input devices (keyboards, mice, joystick, etc.), output devices (monitor screens, printers, etc.), and input/output devices that perform both functions (e.g., the 2000s-era touchscreen). Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source and they enable the result of operations to be saved and retrieved.

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A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word “computer” was in 1613 in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwait: “I haue [sic] read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer [sic] breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.” This usage of the term referred to a human computer, a person who carried out calculations or computations. The word continued with the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this period women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male counterparts.^[1] By 1943, most human computers were women.^[2]

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The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the first attested use of “computer” in the 1640s, meaning “one who calculates”; this is an “agent noun from compute (v.)”. The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean “‘calculating machine’ (of any type) is from 1897.” The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the “modern use” of the term, to mean “programmable digital electronic computer” dates from “1945 under this name; [in a] theoretical [sense] from 1937, as Turing machine“.^[3]

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Pre-20th century

The Ishango bone, a bone tool dating back to prehistoric Africa.

Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was probably a form of tally stick. Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay containers.^[4]^[5] The use of counting rods is one example.

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The Chinese suanpan (算盘). The number represented on this abacus is 6,302,715,408.

The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BC. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In a medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth would be placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating sums of money.^[6]

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The Antikythera mechanism, dating back to ancient Greece circa 150–100 BC, is an early analog computing device.

The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest mechanical analog “computer”, according to Derek J. de Solla Price.^[7] It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to c. 100 BC. Devices of a level of complexity comparable to that of the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until a thousand years later.

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Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in the early 11th century.^[8] The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BC and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer^[9]^[10] and gear-wheels was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan, Persia in 1235.^[11] Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe,^[12] an early fixed-wired knowledge processing machine^[13] with a gear train and gear-wheels,^[14] c. 1000 AD.

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The sector, a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry, multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots, was developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation.

The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over it with a mechanical linkage.

A slide rule.

The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions. Slide rules with special scales are still used for quick performance of routine calculations, such as the E6B circular slide rule used for time and distance calculations on light aircraft.

In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, the world’s first working electromechanical programmable, fully automatic digital computer.^[22]^[23] The Z3 was built with 2000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz.^[24] Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating point numbers. Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage‘s earlier design), using a binary system meant that Zuse’s machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time.^[25] The Z3 was not itself a universal computer but could be extended to be Turing complete.^[26]^[27]

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Vacuum tubes and digital electronic circuits

Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, at the same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers, working at the Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s, began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange. Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later, converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes.^[20] In the US, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942,^[28] the first “automatic electronic digital computer”.^[29] This design was also all-electronic and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory.^[30]

Two women are seen by the Colossus computer.

Concept of modern computer

The principle of the modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper,^[41] On Computable Numbers. Turing proposed a simple device that he called “Universal Computing machine” and that is now known as a universal Turing machine. He proved that such a machine is capable of computing anything that is computable by executing instructions (program) stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental concept of Turing’s design is the stored program, where all the instructions for computing are stored in memory. Von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper.^[42] Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation. Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-complete, which is to say, they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine.

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A section of the Manchester Baby, the first electronic stored-program computer

Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function required the re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine.^[30] With the proposal of the stored-program computer this changed. A stored-program computer includes by design an instruction set and can store in memory a set of instructions (a program) that details the computation. The theoretical basis for the stored-program computer was laid by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His 1945 report “Proposed Electronic Calculator” was the first specification for such a device. John von Neumann at the University of Pennsylvania also circulated his First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC in 1945.^[20]

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The Manchester Baby was the world’s first stored-program computer. It was built at the Victoria University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 December 1948.^[43] It was designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first random-access digital storage device.^[44] Although the computer was considered “small and primitive” by the standards of its time, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer.^[45] As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a more usable computer, the Manchester Mark 1. Grace Hopper was the first person to develop a compiler for programming language.^[2]

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The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available general-purpose computer.^[46] Built by Ferranti, it was delivered to the University of Manchester in December 1951. At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam.^[47] In December 1947, the directors of British catering company J. Lyons & Company decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers. The LEO I computer became operational in December 1951^[48] and ran the world’s first regular routine office computer job.

Transistors

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Diagram showing how a particular MIPS architecture instruction would be decoded by the control system.

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The control unit (often called a control system or central controller) manages the computer’s various components; it reads and interprets (decodes) the program instructions, transforming them into control signals that activate other parts of the computer.^[95] Control systems in advanced computers may change the order of execution of some instructions to improve performance.

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A key component common to all CPUs is the program counter, a special memory cell (a register) that keeps track of which location in memory the next instruction is to be read from.^[96]

The control system’s function is as follows—note that this is a simplified description, and some of these steps may be performed concurrently or in a different order depending on the type of CPU:

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Read the code for the next instruction from the cell indicated by the program counter.
Decode the numerical code for the instruction into a set of commands or signals for each of the other systems.
Increment the program counter so it points to the next instruction.
Read whatever data the instruction requires from cells in memory (or perhaps from an input device). The location of this required data is typically stored within the instruction code.
Provide the necessary data to an ALU or register.
If the instruction requires an ALU or specialized hardware to complete, instruct the hardware to perform the requested operation.
Write the result from the ALU back to a memory location or to a register or perhaps an output device.
Jump back to step (1).

Since the program counter is (conceptually) just another set of memory cells, it can be changed by calculations done in the ALU. Adding 100 to the program counter would cause the next instruction to be read from a place 100 locations further down the program. Instructions that modify the program counter are often known as “jumps” and allow for loops (instructions that are repeated by the computer) and often conditional instruction execution (both examples of control flow).

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The sequence of operations that the control unit goes through to process an instruction is in itself like a short computer program, and indeed, in some more complex CPU designs, there is another yet smaller computer called a microsequencer, which runs a microcode program that causes all of these events to happen.

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The control unit, ALU, and registers are collectively known as a central processing unit (CPU). Early CPUs were composed of many separate components. Since the 1970s, CPUs have typically been constructed on a single MOS integrated circuit chip called a microprocessor.

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The ALU is capable of performing two classes of operations: arithmetic and logic.^[97] The set of arithmetic operations that a particular ALU supports may be limited to addition and subtraction, or might include multiplication, division, trigonometry functions such as sine, cosine, etc., and square roots. Some can only operate on whole numbers (integers) while others use floating point to represent real numbers, albeit with limited precision. However, any computer that is capable of performing just the simplest operations can be programmed to break down the more complex operations into simple steps that it can perform. Therefore, any computer can be programmed to perform any arithmetic operation—although it will take more time to do so if its ALU does not directly support the operation. An ALU may also compare numbers and return boolean truth values (true or false) depending on whether one is equal to, greater than or less than the other (“is 64 greater than 65?”). Logic operations involve Boolean logic: AND, OR, XOR, and NOT. These can be useful for creating complicated conditional statements and processing boolean logic.

Superscalar computers may contain multiple ALUs, allowing them to process several instructions simultaneously.^[98] Graphics processors and computers with SIMD and MIMD features often contain ALUs that can perform arithmetic on vectors and matrices.

Memory

Magnetic-core memory (using magnetic cores) was the computer memory of choice in the 1960s, until it was replaced by semiconductor memory (using MOS memory cells).

A computer’s memory can be viewed as a list of cells into which numbers can be placed or read. Each cell has a numbered “address” and can store a single number. The computer can be instructed to “put the number 123 into the cell numbered 1357” or to “add the number that is in cell 1357 to the number that is in cell 2468 and put the answer into cell 1595.” The information stored in memory may represent practically anything. Letters, numbers, even computer instructions can be placed into memory with equal ease. Since the CPU does not differentiate between different types of information, it is the software’s responsibility to give significance to what the memory sees as nothing but a series of numbers.

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In almost all modern computers, each memory cell is set up to store binary numbers in groups of eight bits (called a byte). Each byte is able to represent 256 different numbers (2⁸ = 256); either from 0 to 255 or −128 to +127. To store larger numbers, several consecutive bytes may be used (typically, two, four or eight). When negative numbers are required, they are usually stored in two’s complement notation. Other arrangements are possible, but are usually not seen outside of specialized applications or historical contexts. A computer can store any kind of information in memory if it can be represented numerically. Modern computers have billions or even trillions of bytes of memory.

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The CPU contains a special set of memory cells called registers that can be read and written to much more rapidly than the main memory area. There are typically between two and one hundred registers depending on the type of CPU. Registers are used for the most frequently needed data items to avoid having to access main memory every time data is needed. As data is constantly being worked on, reducing the need to access main memory (which is often slow compared to the ALU and control units) greatly increases the computer’s speed.

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Computer main memory comes in two principal varieties:

random-access memory or RAM
read-only memory or ROM

RAM can be read and written to anytime the CPU commands it, but ROM is preloaded with data and software that never changes, therefore the CPU can only read from it. ROM is typically used to store the computer’s initial start-up instructions. In general, the contents of RAM are erased when the power to the computer is turned off, but ROM retains its data indefinitely. In a PC, the ROM contains a specialized program called the BIOS that orchestrates loading the computer’s operating system from the hard disk drive into RAM whenever the computer is turned on or reset. In embedded computers, which frequently do not have disk drives, all of the required software may be stored in ROM. Software stored in ROM is often called firmware, because it is notionally more like hardware than software. Flash memory blurs the distinction between ROM and RAM, as it retains its data when turned off but is also rewritable. It is typically much slower than conventional ROM and RAM however, so its use is restricted to applications where high speed is unnecessary.^[99]

In more sophisticated computers there may be one or more RAM cache memories, which are slower than registers but faster than main memory. Generally computers with this sort of cache are designed to move frequently needed data into the cache automatically, often without the need for any intervention on the programmer’s part.

Input/output (I/O)

The defining feature of modern computers which distinguishes them from all other machines is that they can be programmed. That is to say that some type of instructions (the program) can be given to the computer, and it will process them. Modern computers based on the von Neumann architecture often have machine code in the form of an imperative programming language. In practical terms, a computer program may be just a few instructions or extend to many millions of instructions, as do the programs for word processors and web browsers for example. A typical modern computer can execute billions of instructions per second (gigaflops) and rarely makes a mistake over many years of operation. Large computer programs consisting of several million instructions may take teams of programmers years to write, and due to the complexity of the task almost certainly contain errors.

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Replica of the Manchester Baby, the world’s first electronic stored-program computer, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England

Low-level languages.

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Machine languages and the assembly languages that represent them (collectively termed low-level programming languages) are generally unique to the particular architecture of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU).

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For instance, an ARM architecture CPU (such as may be found in a smartphone or a hand-held videogame) cannot understand the machine language of an x86 CPU that might be in a PC.^[106] Historically a significant number of other cpu architectures were created and saw extensive use, notably including the MOS Technology 6502 and 6510 in addition to the Zilog Z80.

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High-level languages

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Although considerably easier than in machine language, writing long programs in assembly language is often difficult and is also error prone. Therefore, most practical programs are written in more abstract high-level programming languages that are able to express the needs of the programmer more conveniently (and thereby help reduce programmer error).

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High level languages are usually “compiled” into machine language (or sometimes into assembly language and then into machine language) using another computer program called a compiler.^[107] High level languages are less related to the workings of the target computer than assembly language, and more related to the language and structure of the problem(s) to be solved by the final program. It is therefore often possible to use different compilers to translate the same high level language program into the machine language of many different types of computer. This is part of the means by which software like video games may be made available for different computer architectures such as personal computers and various video game consoles.