How long do you think it will be until we hit 1 THz? 6 or 7 years? Trying to even understand how fast 7.1 GHz is, is just ridiculous. I wonder how fast our brains operate at...
1THz? We'd have to radically redesign the fabrication of processors to hit those speeds. Optical interconnects are a good start. We won't do it on any current process.
There are several ways to answer the question about how fast the brain processes information.
The best answer for this question can be obtained because we have good estimates for the three main variables that enter into it: how many neurons (brain cells) we have, how fast a neuron can fire, and how many cells it connects to. A human being has about 100 billion brain cells. Although different neurons fire at different speeds, as a rough estimate it is reasonable to estimate that a neuron can fire about once every 5 milliseconds, or about 200 times a second. The number of cells each neuron is connected to also varies, but as a rough estimate it is reasonable to say that each neuron connects to 1000 other neurons- so every time a neuron fires, about 1000 other neurons get information about that firing. If we multiply all this out we get 100 billion neurons X 200 firings per second X 1000 connections per firing = 20 million billion calculations per second.
The 'clock speed' of a neuron is abysmal by technological standards. The central processing unit in the machine on which I wrote this document has a 1 Ghz. clock speed, which means it runs1000 million clock cycles per second. If we divide 1000 million by 200, we see that the CPU on my computer is 5 million times faster than the clock speed of a neuron. Of course the computational power of our brains comes from the fact that we have a lot of neurons.
BuddyJ
Dept. of PropagandaOKC Icrontian
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The best answer for this question can be obtained because we have good estimates for the three main variables that enter into it: how many neurons (brain cells) we have, how fast a neuron can fire, and how many cells it connects to. A human being has about 100 billion brain cells. Although different neurons fire at different speeds, as a rough estimate it is reasonable to estimate that a neuron can fire about once every 5 milliseconds, or about 200 times a second. The number of cells each neuron is connected to also varies, but as a rough estimate it is reasonable to say that each neuron connects to 1000 other neurons- so every time a neuron fires, about 1000 other neurons get information about that firing. If we multiply all this out we get 100 billion neurons X 200 firings per second X 1000 connections per firing = 20 million billion calculations per second.
The 'clock speed' of a neuron is abysmal by technological standards. The central processing unit in the machine on which I wrote this document has a 1 Ghz. clock speed, which means it runs1000 million clock cycles per second. If we divide 1000 million by 200, we see that the CPU on my computer is 5 million times faster than the clock speed of a neuron. Of course the computational power of our brains comes from the fact that we have a lot of neurons.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/howfast.html