Processors will outsmart human brains within a decade?

04:35 Gadgets , Hardware 0 Comments

Human Brain

Human brain is the command center for the human Nervous system. It receives information (inputs) from the sensory Organs, processes the received information and sends the appropriate commands to the muscles. The brain accepts and executes a lot of information per seconds.

A Microprocessor is a small IC that incorporates the functions of the central processing unit (CPU) and acts as a brain of the computer. Microprocessor is a programmable device, it accepts the input data and process the data according to the instruction stored to its memory and provides the results as output.

Microprocessor is also known as the ‘Brain of computer’. What made the microprocessor known as the ‘Brain of computer’ is the functions it performs in the computer and the way the data are imported and exported from the computer.

Microprocessor receives data from and sends the appropriate commands to different parts of the computer through buses (data bus, address bus and control bus) and performs all decisions of the computer.


Microprocessor and buses

 Before microprocessor the small computers had been implemented using racks of circuit boards with many medium and small scale integrated circuits (IC). The earlier design of the microprocessor integrated this into one or a few large ICs.

The purpose of the microprocessor designers had been to create a microprocessor with increasing capacity and with high speed. By capacity I mean the number of binary digits (bits) the microprocessor will be able to process per second ,and by speed I mean how fast the processor does the work (the number of cycles per second).  

The Intel 4004 (a 4-bit) microprocessor was the first commercially used microprocessor that was released in 1970s.

Intel 4004

Since then different microchip producing companies has invested in researching, designing and developing microprocessor with increasing performance and capacity. 

Today the design of microprocessor has improved greatly to the extent that there are microprocessor that operates at 128-bits per second (it’s quite an improvement), the clock speed has increased (to GHz) as well as the new incorporated technologies like Turbo boost and Hyper- Threading.

The Turbo Boosting technology allows the processor to automatically increase its performance whenever the need arises.

Now the question arise, with these improvements in the microprocessor design, will the processor outsmart human brain within a decade?

 The former Intel’s senior vice president Mooly Eden, said "The human brain has 100 billion neurons, it's a complicated machine. But in 12 years we will have more transistors in our chips than we have neurons in our brain", believing that maybe one day the microprocessor will perform faster than the human brain does.

Former Intel's vice president Mooly Eden, presenting the development of Intel processor

Maybe they will be able to achieve that (making the processor smarter than the human brain). Let’s hope for that.

My take; it will take them many years to make the processor that can outsmart the Human brain or probably they won’t make it, because the Human brain does a lot of things that will be hard for the processor to perform take for example reasoning, and thinking capability of the human brain.