Here is an interesting fact. John Timmer writes that a pair of researchers, Martin Hilbert (USC) and Prisicilla Lopez (Open University of Catalonia), have been looking at the growth of computer power and storage over the past twenty plus years. They found that GPUs account for the “lion's share of the 6.4 x 1018 operations a second that the planet can now perform.” They also showed a compound annual growth rate of 86 percent over the study period. Breaking down the results by devices, they found by 2007 94% of our technical memory was in a digital format and that phones held six percent of world processing power, but the big story was gaming hardware, which shot up to a quarter of the total computational capacity, pushing the PC back down to a two-thirds share. Supercomputers are apparently rare enough not to measure.
However, before we get impressed with our technological prowess, the authors make some comparisons with biology. "To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second," they write. So all the computers in the world have now reached the capacity of one person. Congratulations.
At Darwin we have long respected the human brain and designed our Awareness Engine™ to enhance the human brain’s capacity to decide where to look next and quickly scan through large amounts of content to find what is relevant, as long as the visualizations around this content are designed to help with the process. This is welcome news.
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