There have been limitless occasions wherein the abilities and computational speeds of computer processors, and computers in general, have been compared with the human brain or more precisely, the human mind. The comparison seems logical as long as all we intend to gain from it is a simple pastime!
The weight of an average human brain is 1400 grams. About 100 billion nerve cells or neurons occupy this weight behaving as primary functional units. Neurons are capable of receiving, processing, and relaying the electrochemical pulses on which all our sensations, actions, thoughts, and emotions depend.
Neurons have specialized projections called dendrites and axons. Each neuron may have up to tens of thousands of dendrites. Each of these dendrites overlaps with the dendrites of other cells and even the same cell to form synapses. Largely the number of these synapses in a human brain ranges between 100 to 500 trillion. Each of these synaptic connections are said to be – though they cannot be compared – equivalent to tens of gigahertz of a computer processor speed.
Numerous approximations of the speed of the human brain have already appeared in literature based on these "hardware" considerations (though in the case of the human brain perchance the term "wetware" is more proper). It seems reasonable to conclude that the human brain has a raw computational power between 10
13 and 1016 floating operations per second (FLOPS)! No doubt it can be more than this.
What will match this? Intel's latest processor that goes beyond the 4.26 Ghz mark, or AMD's 64 FX or some G from Apple? The fastest computer in the world as of November 2006 was the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, measuring a peak of 280.6 Terra FLOPS.
