What is the Fastest Computer in the World?

Although the speed of computers is growing exponentially, the human brain may handle roughly ten quadrillion instructions per second. Learn more about the world's fastest computer in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works dot com
where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question,
what is the fastest computer in the world. To put
things in perspective, Let's start with the computer sitting on
your desk, the computer you use on a day to
day basis to browse the internet, handle email, create documents,

(00:24):
and so on. Most people have some kind of Intel
or am D processor. A computer likeness can execute approximately
two billion instructions per second. Your in particular machine might
be twice that fast or half that fast, but that's
the ballpart. The fastest computer in the world is much
faster than that, and it's sitting right on top of

(00:47):
your shoulders. The human brain is an amazing computing device
and the fastest processor available. Right now, let me give
you an example. Your desktop computer is just starting to
get to the point where it can understand speech and
take dictation, translating spoken words into written words. It can
only understand one speaker well, and that speaker has to

(01:10):
train it for about twenty minutes, and the dictation software
will still make a lot of mistakes. So two billion
instructions per second can barely handle dictation, right now. Your brain,
on the other hand, can understand any number of speakers.
It needs no training and will make zero mistakes. It
may even be able to understand multiple languages, and the

(01:32):
speech processing portion of your brain is just one small
part of the whole package. Your brain can also process
complex visual images, control your entire body, understand conceptual problems,
and create new ideas. Your brain is made up of
about one trillion cells, with a hundred trillion connections between

(01:52):
those cells. We might take a rough estimate and say
it's handling ten quadrillion instructions per second, but it really is.
It's hard to say. In the Top five hundred list,
which ranks supercomputers by speed, the top supercomputer right now
can handle five dred or so trillion operations per second.

(02:13):
It's about one as powerful as the human brain. Another
supercomputer called md Grape three, built by the Japanese company Reikin,
has a theoretical maximum speed of one pedal flop or
one quadrillion operations per second, but that computer can't run
the official ranking software, so it's hard to compare it

(02:35):
with the other supercomputers. Even so, it's still not as
fast as your brain. Do you have any ideas or
suggestions for this podcast. If so, please send me an
email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, go to
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