One of the most important science fiction films is Terminator, which gives rise to a great saga of films. The film tells us about a very powerful artificial intelligence created by humans called Skynet. Well, the new NVIDIA RTX 4090as detected by a Terminator fan, is more powerful than Skynet.
The movie saga tells us that after a nuclear war, humanity is on the verge of extinction. Then, a computer containing the artificial intelligence Skynet takes control. The story starts in 2029 (the day after tomorrow, as it were) with John Connor as the leader of the Resistance that seeks to end Skynet.
Skynet couldn’t beat the RTX 4090
As often happens, the future imagined in the science fiction of the 70s, 80s and 90s often falls short of reality. We have already seen some cases in which this imagery has been far from reality or in some cases, it has been surpassed.
A fan of the Terminator saga has seen an interesting detail in the original film. As he has seen, the computer that gives life to sky net has a power of 60 Tflop/s. This means that this computer has the capacity to perform 60 trillion floating point operations per second.
The new one NVIDIA RTX 4090 reaching a frequency of 3.15 GHz has a 100 Tflop/s power. We talked about a “simple” graphics card having almost twice the computing power of Skynet. Quite simply, the power of this AI is 60% less than that of the most powerful gaming graphics card in the world.
Let’s give a bit of context. The Terminator premiered in 1984, when computing was in its infancy. So much so that the first graphics card was created in 1981, an 8-bit ISA graphics card. So a long time has passed and computing has evolved like a beast.
Such has been the evolution of computing that Moore’s Law is history. This law says that the power doubles every two years, but this is no longer a reality, at least in the case of NVIDIA.
Of course, today we “laugh” that Skynet is much less powerful than a gaming graphics card. But of course, in 1984, that computing power was an astronomical figure and it seemed impossible to achieve beyond a supercomputer.
Frontier could host more than 18,000 Skynets
Yes, it is truly brutal that an RTX 4090 has almost twice the power of Skynet. But, if we compare it with the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the figure is even more ridiculous. waterfordbanquet.com
Currently, Frontier is the most powerful computer in the world with a power of 1102 PFlop/s. To give us an idea, 1 PFlop/s is equal to 1000 TFlop/s. If we bring the power of Frontier to the same level as Skynet, the power is 1,102,000 TFlop/s. As Skynet is rated at 60 TFlops, the Frontier supercomputer could run more than 18,000 AIs like Skynet.
The most interesting thing of all is that at the moment, we do not have an AI with such a bad grape. Let’s hope we never get to this governed by a Skynet, though sometimes…
