Computer processing power for the next decade will be the gateway for singularity

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It’s 1-1-2010, the new year, the new decade. Actually I think the real new decade starts on 2011, since there really was no year zero, but that can be argued another day, maybe at the end of 2010. The last few days have brought about a lot of year and decade in review shows. In my opinion the overall vibe for the last decade was bad. Some say a wasted decade.

In many cases they are correct, but of course technology marched on. Internet businesses imploded then regrouped to form many new ways to run a business. There is much to talk about as businesses find new interesting ways to march on, but this first post of 2010 will be more on the big picture for processing power over the next decade.

This next decade will be remarkable, 2020 is going to be exciting. Start keeping track of innovations and new technologies now so you can see the changes. Will they make our lives easier? probably not… look at computers from the last 2 decades. All we heard about was how they will make our lives better and improve our time management. Well, it hasn’t, we work more, spend more time away from “real” people and now spend a majority of time with followers from around the world.

We are hyper-social, yet interact with fewer people. We have more information about overall health, but the US is overweight. We have terabytes of past information about the stock market yet, we cannot predict outcomes to common stock prices.

Back to processing power. The end of a decade is a good time to look back to see how we have advanced with computers. The reason why I’m started to look back was because I was watching a show about the singularity of computers and technology. Singularity is the theory that someday computers will be smarter then humans and therefore be able to overtake humans… Terminator style.

Many people say this WILL happen, but the person on the show basically said that by 2030 computers will be so powerful that if singularity is going to happen, it will. If it has not happened by then, it probably won’t… I found that interesting, so I took a look at the fastest processors that we have today for personal computers and compared them to processors from the year 2000.

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change

Sure, there are supercomputers that can harness the power of multiple processers and in turn have much higher MIPS (million instructions per second), but singularity would seem that each processor will have to be able to manage millions of MIPS. Yes, I said a million X a million instructions per second, because that is how many instructions the human brain and nervous system can handle. Some say the brain can handle much more then that.

Currently the Intel i7 processor can manage 76,000 MIPS at 3.2 g. Compare that to a typical Pentium III released in 2000 which had around 830 MIPS. That is astonishing growth.

So, this decade will be special, either this decade or the next will be the gateway into new technologies that we haven’t even thought of yet. By the end of this decade we will have a very solid understanding of if, or when computer processing power will be able to rival the human brain.