CPUs have recently become more and more powerful. Sure, 582 million transistors in a single chip. its huge amount, and it obeys moores law.
my q6600 is capable of 2.4ghz per core, of which there are four. So four streams of data can be handled at 2.4 billion cycles per second, yeh?
Video cards are often ignored for their processing power. Sure, the processing power of a video card, say for example my video card is 576mhz. Thats 1/5th of the clock speed of my CPU.
But the card has 1.4 BILLION transitors. And it has 1 9 2 processing cores. Not 4. One Hundred Ninety Two.
It never dawned to me that this was the difference between parallels and serial computing devices. But now GPUs are getting so powerful, that you can image calculations that are based in visualiation (not just games) But are starting to mimic real life images.
So that brought me to this one point. Black Holes are the fastest Serial computing devices in the world. it feeds data in one dimensional towards a singularity, at which Matter itself is processed at the speed of light.
Your brain on the other hand is the universe’ fastest and most complex parallel computing device. Its does 1000 trillion calculations in a single instance. Think that’s crazy?
Well, for example. Your eyes are subatomic particle detectors. They detect photons. And in a typical instance are detecting trillions upon trillions of photons. You’re brain doesn’t process the image as a whole, but rather processes each photon individual to make up the picture. Kinda like how a video card translates each pixel on your screen. Your brain is detecting trillions and trillions of particles that don’t have weight, that have very little energy on their own, and its hitting an area something the size of a dim, yet you see full color and everything is good.
And your brain doesn’t even lag.
it goes to show that, yes, we are the worst mathematical machines. We process mathematical operations as in the milliflops per second. meaning Floating operations per second…But modern cpus can do it in the gigaflops.
Our individual parallel cores can only muster mililflops per second, But when you have a 1000 trillion of those, we can make and process beautiful senses, think thoughts and basically create and rebuild and do all these crazy emotions…and your brain never misses a beat.