World's Total Combined CPU Power Now Equals One Human Brain
By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-03-08
Here is an interesting fact. John Timmer writes that a pair of researchers, Martin Hilbert (USC) and Prisicilla Lopez (Open University of Catalonia), have been looking at the growth of computer power and storage over the past twenty plus years.
They found that GPUs account for the "lion's share of the 6.4 x 1018 operations a second that the planet can now perform." They also showed a compound annual growth rate of 86 percent over the study period. Breaking down the results by devices, they found by 2007 94% of our technical memory was in a digital format and that phones held six percent of world processing power, but the big story was gaming hardware, which shot up to a quarter of the total computational capacity, pushing the PC back down to a two-thirds share. Supercomputers are apparently rare enough not to measure.However, before we get impressed with our technological prowess, the authors make some comparisons with biology. "To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second," they write. So all the computers in the world have now reached the capacity of one person. Congratulations. At Darwin we have long respected the human brain and designed our Awareness Engine™ to enhance the human brain's capacity to decide where to look next and quickly scan through large amounts of content to find what is relevant, as long as the visualizations around this content are designed to help with the process. This is welcome news. Comments
About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.
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