Look at the machine on your desk. It’s probably a Windows PC with a Pentium chip, or maybe a Macintosh. You use it to surf the web, crunch spreadsheets, and write documents. It executes roughly 100 million instructions per second. Yours might be twice as fast. Or half. The exact number doesn’t matter as much as the scale.
The fastest computer in the world isn’t in a server farm. It’s sitting on your shoulders.
Your brain is the current speed king. Let’s look at speech recognition, a task we think is hard for machines. A standard desktop is just now getting good enough to take dictation. It translates spoken words into text. But there are catches. The software needs a single speaker. That speaker has to train the program for about 20 minutes. And even then, it makes mistakes. All that 100 million instructions per second can barely handle the basics of human speech.
Your brain does it differently. It understands any number of speakers. No training required. Zero mistakes. It might even parse multiple languages simultaneously. This speech processing is just one small slice of the package. Your brain also handles complex visual images. It controls your entire body. It solves conceptual problems. It creates new ideas from thin air.
“Your brain is made up of about one trillion cells with 100 trillion connections between those cells.”
We estimate the brain handles 10 quadrillion instructions per second. We say “estimate” because it’s hard to pin down. The architecture is simply too complex. There are about one trillion cells. Each cell has roughly 100 trillion connections.
Compare that to the 2006 TOP500 list. This ranking tracks the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The top three spots were dominated by IBM.
- IBM’s BlueGene/L – 360 teraflops
- IBM’s BGW – 115 teraflops
- IBM’s ASC Purple – 93 teraflops
IBM’s BlueGene/L was leading with 360 trillion operations per second. That sounds insane. It isn’t as fast as your brain though.
There was another contender. MDGrape-3. Built by the Japanese research institute RIKEN. It has a theoretical maximum speed of 1 petaflop. That’s 1 quadrillion operations per second. It’s three times faster than BlueGene/L.
MDGrape-3 didn’t make the top spot. It couldn’t run the official ranking software for the TOP500 list. So BlueGene/L stayed at number one. 360 trillion operations per second. Impressive hardware. But still not as fast as the biological processor you’re using to read this right now.
