IanaEE, but I am a CE: The human brain has 10e15 synapses [1] and 2.5 petabytes of storage[2]. A modern quad core processor has about 7e8[3] transistors. Now

IanaEE, but I am a CE: The human brain has 10e15 synapses [1] and 2.5 petabytes of storage[2]. A modern quad core processor has about 7e8[3] transistors. Now the brains switches and storage probably can't be directly equated to a processor, but presumably it is within a few orders of magnitude. A conservate estimate would require about 10e6 times the density to get the same density as the human brain on a chip. 10e6 ~ 2^20, so that's about 20 years assuming Moore's Law holds. So in terms of raw performance, we have a ways to go. Memristors are about 10 times as dense as transistors currently [4]. They also offer non-volatile storage in addition to processing power and the possibility of fitting in a three dimensional structure. I won't guess what this imlies, but I assume it's going to get us much closer to a circuit similar to a human brain. Am I wrong? Probably somewhere. Does any of this matter? I have no idea. We won't know until we try. Personally, I'm VERY excited about the possibilities behind memristors, and wish I understood them better. I can't think of a development in the past 20 years that has more potential to advance computers. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920485 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920485 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain [2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture) [4] http://www.physorg.com/news156526733.html http://www.physorg.com/news156526733.html