From Open the Future via Boing Boing. Researchers at IBM have created a machine that has the same number of connections and operates the same speed as 1/10th of a mouse brain. The machine does not simulate the structure of the mouse brain. That's 8,000,000 neurons with 6,300 synapses per neuron and a firing rate of 1Hz. In order to accomplish this task a 4096 processor BlueGene computer was used with 1 Terabyte of system memory.

Intel in cooperation with IBM has created a computer chip that delivers a teraflop of performance. That means the chip is able to perform a trillion floating point mathematical operations per second. At the moment, it takes a supercomputer or a computing cluster to achieve that kind of performance. The performance was achieved by figured out a way to put 80 core calculating engines on a single chip. The chip consumes much less power than other similar available methods (62 watts at 3.16 gHz vs 500 kilowatts for 10,000 pentium chips). At the same time the chip contains about 1/3 less transistors than Intel's previous chip; or about 100 million transistors.