[Nottingham] [Talk] *TODAY* Thurs 03/12/2009 Moblin, Netbooks, Files & RAID

[Martin]

Martin wrote:
> Martin wrote:
[---]
> 
> And for comparing transistor counts to Human neuron counts, see:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurons#Neurons_in_the_brain
> 
> That lists about 1.5 billion transistors for current CPUs and GPUs, with
> the latest CPU, GPU and FPGA chips soon to reach 2.5 billion
> transistors. Likely about the same again for RAM chips, except that you
> have more of those in a system! (Anyone with transistor counts for RAM
> chips?)
> 
> For the wet logic stuff:
> 
> "The number of neurons in the brain varies dramatically from species to
> species. One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11)
> neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses (connections). ... By
> contrast, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans has just 302 neurons."
> 
> ... And beer drinkers I guess will count somewhere in between.
> 
> That does suggest that present day supercomputers have more transistors
> than a Human has neurons.
> 
> Perhaps we just need to get HURD working!


And we're now pushing towards 16 Peta-FLOPs:

Power7-Based, 10-petaflop Supercomputer

http://news.softpedia.com/news/IBM-Working-On-Power7-Based-10-petaflop-Supercomputer-129146.shtml

The Blue Waters HPC platform will be stationed at the University of Illinois


How many transistors in that?!

How many PCs + nVidia CUDA GPU cards to equal that?... :-)


Cheers,
Martin

-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
----------------