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starfyredragon t1_iwhk02b wrote

As someone who has worked in bioinformatics and done the math... 64 exaflops is huge. And by huge, I mean, 5 exaflops is the processing capability of the human brain. This thing, depending on how they build it, has the potential to be five times as smart as a human. Up until now, our best has been approaching one exaflop, which meant on par with certain pets.

Not convinced they'll actually pull it off, though.

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existentialzebra t1_iwhogrb wrote

Any idea how they determine how fast the human brain is? That’s really interesting to me.

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starfyredragon t1_iwhtvbz wrote

Basically how fast a neuron can transmit a signal by how many dendrite-to-neuron connections there are.

The funny part is in the human brain, storage and processing are pretty much the same thing (so storage and processing are the same); it'd be like if the whole hard drive was stored in L1 caching. Previously, I had been watching HDD's, wondering when they'd hit the 5 exa- threshold; this article about processors hitting exabytes completely blindsided me, because if its actively processing, it can effectively count as storage, like the brain does it of the two being synonymous - meaning I was expecting this point maybe a decade and a half from now; not potentially next or even this year. Thing is, with a 5 exaflop computer, you could actually do a full human brain. With 64 exa- well... you're solidly into territory where we better start looking to science fiction for advice.

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