Body oil - check
Wrong sound effects - check
Eye gouging - check
Obligatory Arnold-esque sound bite - check
The only thing missing from this testosterone-laden action film is a robot.
8/18/2006
The most ridiculous fight scene evar
Facebook badge
The developers have released yet another useful feature, to add interconnectedness between your FB account and your websites. It’s called a badge (many other web 2.0 services are creating them too).
It’s a javascript, so end-users end up sucking down a lot of bandwidth FB must pay for. I mention this because aggregated over a long period of time, it will cost a pretty penny to continually load the images every time someone visits your site. Note: this is an internally created application, not one from the newly released API.
If you look at the right side of the front page and scroll down, you will see mine (you can flip through the recent images I’ve uploaded by clicking “prev” or “next”).
FLOPS, MIPS, Watts and the Human Brain
With the seemingly rapid increase in supercomputer development, what exactly is the State of Computing Power relative to the human mind?
First, is there a direct comparison? Not really.
Supercomputers, such as those ranked in the semi-annual Top500 listing are typically designed to calculate math-intensive equations (e.g. decrypting codes, nuclear simulations, climate modeling).
In fact, among supercomputers there is a diverse ecosystem of computing specialities. For instance, the Japanese MDGRAPE-3 is capable of performing approximately 1 petaflop, which is more than 3 times faster than the IBM Blue Gene/L, the fastest computer listed on the Top500 chart.
Yet, despite this feat, the MDGRAPE-3 is not considered a “general purpose” computer due to its use of specialized pipelines designed to simulate molecular dynamics.
So, what are these FLOPS?
It stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second. It is used to measure a computer’s performance, especially those that make heavy use of floating point calculations. A floating point is just a series of numbers with a decimal point somewhere in it.
If you are familiar with the nomenclature heirarchy used to measure RAM or hard drive space (e.g. 16 megabytes, 120 gigabytes), you can see the similarity below:
megaFLOPS (MFLOPS, 106 FLOPS)
gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS, 109 FLOPS)
teraFLOPS (TFLOPS, 1012 FLOPS)
petaFLOPS (PFLOPS, 1015 FLOPS)
exaFLOPS (EFLOPS, 1018 FLOPS)
Here is an idea of what kind of performance popular chips are rated:
AMD Athlon @ 600 mhz - 2.4 gigaflops (single precision), 1 gigaflop (double precision)
Pentium 4 @ 2 ghz - 8 gigaflops (single precision)
Pentium 4 @ 3 ghz - 12 gigaflops
Athlon 64 X2 4600 - 14.7 gigaflops, 17400 MIPS
G5 Dual 2.3GHz - 30 gigaflops
XBox 360 Xenon chip -115 gigaflops
XBOX 360 Xenos graphics chip - 240 gigaflops
nVIDIA 7800 GTX 512 - 200 gigaflops
ATi X1900 - 553.8 gigaflops
A couple of things to keep in mind. These are theoretical speeds on paper, not what is necessarily done in the “real world.” System buses, RAM type, and I/O speeds all will effect the overall system performance. Furthermore, performance-per-watt and MIPS should be considered as well.
MIPS stands for million of instructions per second. This is typically measured by how long it takes to execute a mix of sequences including various synthetically designed programs and real-world applications.
Pentium 4 - 1500 MIPS at 1.5 GHz - released in 2000
AMD Athlon FX-57 - 12000 MIPS at 2.8 GHz - released in 2005
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2 (Dual Core) - 18900 MIPS at 2.2 GHz - released in 2005
AMD Athlon FX-60 (Dual Core) - 22150 MIPS at 2.6 GHz - released in 2006
A watt is a measurement of energy use relative to time (e.g. 1 Watt is 1 joule used in 1 second). Products you might be familiar with:
Xbox 360 - 160 Watt
GeForce 7800 GTX - 100 Watt
ATi X1900 XT - 132 Watt
Athlon 64 @ 2.4 Ghz - 62 Watt
Intel Core Duo 2 @ 2.67 Ghz - around 65 Watt
By comparison, the human brain uses about 20 watts or about 100 watts to power the entire body. And the average household light bulb uses 40-100 watts.
Furthermore, there is no real consensus regarding the computational power of the human brain. Some estimates suggest that it is capable of 1017 FLOPS, or 100 petaflops.
According to Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon University (whom used the processing speed of the retina), estimates that the brain operates at 100 million MIPS (or is it 100 teraflops?). Nick Bostrom of Yale estimates it to be 1,000 times higher than Moravec’s number (or 100 petaflops). [Note: one must not conflate specialized hardware designed to defeat "grandmaster" chess players with the wide ranging cognitive abilities human brains are capable of].
Also, Japanese politicians have decided to fund the construction of a 10 petaflop computer system by 2011. Contrast that with IBM’s private partnership with a Swiss Institute, to develop a 28 teraflop computer to emulate the activity of brain neurons — appropriately called Blue Brain.
This is part one of a discussion surrounding synthetically created intelligence, mind uploading and the technological singularity. And I am not betting on these phenomenon happening anytime soon.