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.
Amazingly, though, there are still some things that humans do significantly faster than computers.
ReplyDeleteBut we'll just let those damn computer scientists and engineers figure that one out. :P
Good to know we have some job security...
Good words.
ReplyDelete