I'M YOUR VENUS, I'M YOUR FIRE, IT'S YOUR DESIRE

This past week Fujitsu Ltd. announced that they have developed the world's fastest central processing unit, called Venus, capable of performing 128 gigaflops - er, billion calculations per second. That's about 2.5 times faster than the previous record-holding model made by Intel. Comparatively, it takes your hand and a pencil .0119 seconds to jot down instructions from your brain. Which is a little different than the calculations speed per second for your mind to determine whether you need brats or dogs for Saturday's BBQ which may or may not happen depending on whether it rains. Can you compute that faster? Maybe.

Let's just say a CPU chucking out 128 billion calculations per second is fast, and after you throw tens of thousands of them into a super computer you've got something that should be able to do your laundry. There is a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory nicknamed "Jaguar" that can crunch a quadrillion calculations per second. It's like if everyone in the world performed one mathematical calculation per sec, it would take 650 years to do what Jaguar can do in one day. And that's about 55,000 times faster than your typical PC. Vavoom!

So, Fujitsu's plan is to have a supercomputer chock full of these microprocessors, fully named Venus SPARC64 VIIIfx, up and running by 2010 at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Science (Riken). Again, Moore's Law of computational miniaturization is in full swing here. Fujitsu was able to double the number of central circuits integrated onto a chip -- measuring about 2 centimeters square -- from four to eight. That's a chip 2 times the width of a CD case according to the over-hyped and almost useful Wolfram Alpha.

And The Venus will be greener -- designed to be energy efficient by cutting electricity consumption to about one-third of current levels.

Like many of the largest supercomputers churning out Matrix-like realities, the Venus will be used for new industrial pharmaceutical development, earthquake prediction and rocket engine design. But on the consumer level it may be used in devices such as personal computers and digital electronic appliances, perhaps leading to the development of equipment such as portable simultaneous interpretation machines and automated driving devices for cars. That's what I need.