Think your computer is slow now?

IBM’s Blue Gene passes petaflop milestone: News – Hardware – ZDNet Australia
IBM claims that its new Blue Gene/P supercomputer, operating at petaflop speed performs more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops.

IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer — the Blue Gene/P — that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

Well, now what do you think about your laptop?

Here’s another quote:

The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2×2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.

In other words, when they duplicate this configuration with state of the art 3 GHz cores, the result will be an order of magnitude faster. And by then, of course, the core chips will be faster still. Soon enough we’ll be talking about “exaflop” computing, which is 10 raised to the 18th power operations per second.

Kurzweil is looking smarter every day….