200,000 neurons live a synthetic a day per second.
Contemporary computers that you'd find in any office or home have the usual amount of cores - somewhere between one and four - are great for the single-threaded tasks that we pit them up against, but aren't capable enough to deal with some tasks.
A team of scientists from the Fast Analog Computing With Emergent Transient States project (FACETS) have tackled the challenge that has been on neuroscience's mind for a while now - emulating a human brain.
Current architectures for modern CPU cores aren't particularly conducive for this task, as their logic cores, pipelines and other features all work together on a single thread (or in the case of HyperThreading, two threads).
They're not very modular, and simply adding cores to the one die isn't possible without working out a system bus to coordinate communication between them, and this is exactly the problem that the FACETS team has tackled - architecture.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010