World’s Total CPU Power = One Human Brain

No kidding - here:

"Computation is probably the most varied mix of hardware of the lot. Back in 1986, pocket calculators represented about 40 percent of all computer capacity, beating out PCs at 33 percent and servers at 17 percent. Even then, gaming hardware held a nine percent share.

Calculators were gone by 2000, when the PC peaked at 86 percent and the mobile phone/PDA first appeared at 3 percent. By 2007, phones held six percent of world processing power, but the big story was gaming hardware, which shot up to a quarter of the total computational capacity, pushing the PC back down to a two-thirds share. Supercomputers are apparently rare enough not to measure.

One surprising result of the research is the amount of total horsepower found in the application-specific space, where the authors considered only DSPs, microcontrollers, and GPUs (GPUs alone account for 97 percent of this category’s capacity). And that capacity is huge, about 30 times that of all the general purpose computation hardware. GPUs account for the lion’s share of the 6.4 x 10¹⁸ operations a second that the planet can now perform, and they showed a compound annual growth rate of 86 percent over the study period.

Lest we get too enamored with our technological prowess, however, the authors make some comparisons with biology. “To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*10¹⁸ instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,” they write.

Our total storage capacity is the same as an adult human’s DNA. And there are several billion humans on the planet."