Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? (2018)
One kind of efficiency which hasn&#x27;t been talked about is the energy loss of things like state switching and keeping the current state enabled. I think that brains build on much more efficient primitives than the silicon transistors computer chips use and thus can perform far more computations for far less energy than a desktop CPU.<p>Another difference between CPUs and brains is that brains are much less general purpose. CPUs do run-time interpreting of instructions while brains process data in a more straightforward way like GPUs do. Many problems can be implemented into GPUs and they will run much faster. I&#x27;d argue that brains excel at such tasks while being harder at tasks that require lots of state to be kept around as well as conditional jumps like computing a hash function or compiling a program. CPUs excel at those tasks.