Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Computers Are Fast

What have you done in the last second? Because your computer could have done a billion things.

Do you ever stop to think about how much work a CPU running at 1Ghz is doing? A lifetime isn't enough for a human to consciously do a billion of anything (although the brain's equivalent clock speed is much higher for subconscious tasks like vision processing). The task of calculating Pi to a million digits was beyond the wildest dreams of a millennium of mathematicians. But we can give a computer the task, and it'll come back with the answer in one second!

One nanosecond is too small to ever comprehend, but that is the basic unit of time for a computer's operations. For a computer, one second must be an eternity.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amazingly, though, there are still some things that humans do significantly faster than computers.

But we'll just let those damn computer scientists and engineers figure that one out. :P

Good to know we have some job security...

Anonymous said...

Good words.