Business Insight Zone

Former Wired editor-in-chief and current thinker-of-big-thoughts Kevin Kelly offers some interesting reflections on the “global machine” or “planetary computer” of which the Web is the current operating system.

One thing to note is that there are just as many processing chips in the Machine (one billion from the one billion online PCs) as there transitors in an Itanium chip. The Machine is a super computer where each “transistor” is computer. A very rough estimate of the computing power of this Machine then is that it contains a billion times a billion, or one quintillion (10^18) transistors. Since only the newest servers have a billion processors, the figure is probably an order of magnitude smaller. When we add the transistors for cell phones, handhelds, it calculates out to about 170 quadrillion (10^17) transistors wired into the Machine

There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Today the Machine has as 5 orders more transistors than you have neurons in your head. And the Machine, unlike your brain, is doubling in power every couple of years at the minimum.

He goes on to offer estimates for how much information flows through this machine and how much energy it consumes. The piece is worth reading to stimulate your thinking about where computing may take us in the coming decades.

Link.

Category: Internet,Technology