Computational power of neural systems
1,000 MIPS (million instructions per second) needed to derive edge or motion detections from video "ten times per second to match the retina … The 1,500 cubic centimeter human brain is about 100,000 times as large as the retina, suggesting that matching overall human behavior will take about 100 million MIPS of computer power … The most powerful experimental supercomputers in 1998, costing tens of millions of dollars, can do a few million MIPS."
"The ratio of memory to speed has remained constant during computing history [at Mbyte/MIPS] … [the human] 100 trillion synapse brain would hold the equivalent 100 million megabytes."
--Hans Moravec http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book97/ch3/retina.comment.html
2002: the ESC is 35 Tflops & 10Tbytes. http://www.top500.org/