Ever since man’s brain started working (yes, Maxima, humanity’s male members have brains, though you can’t tell from how they have been behaving for the past millennium or two), it has been his obsession to come up with the biggest, fastest, best or worst, of whatever he is building, constructing, or thinking of.

Cars? His automobile must have the biggest number of horses beneath the hood. Guns? His firearms must shoot the biggest bullet with the farthest reach and maximum deadliness and accuracy. Children? He must have the largest brood, with the biggest number of mothers, if possible.

In the field of computing, geeks, especially the trying-hard-to-be kind, would forever lose sleep unless they had the fastest computers. The bigger the number of cores, the higher the clock speeds, the bigger the hard disks, the more RAM they could cram, the happier these IT jocks are.

Intel’s Quad-Core Galore

Intel is set to make these people really, truly, sincerely happy with the company’s latest Nehalem quad-core processors. Codenamed Lynnfield, these processors are designed for desktop computers, both from the PC and Mac tribes.

Ensuring that neither of the Windows and Macintosh faithfuls would be left out, software vendors are reengineering their software and operating systems to make the most of the multi-core and multi-threading potentials of these quad-core chips from Intel.

Soon, anybody can have desktop computers that can perform computing tasks as fast as those mainframe supercomputers do.

Supercomputers for Supergeeks

A couple of months or so ago, the most recent TOP500 list of supercomputers was unveiled in Germany. IBM’s Roadrunner, which uses a combination of AMD and Cell processors, took the top spot, though barely. IBM’s entry posted a 1.105 PetaFlops mark on the Linpack benchmarking system. Second placer Jaguar supercomputer from Cray recorded a mark of 1.059 PetaFlops, missing the top bragging rights by a hair.

The competition for having the most kickass fast computer in the world has been seeing a number of entrants from countries that were not traditionally included in the list. Maybe one of these days, computer scientists from our country can design and build a supercomputer worthy of consideration for inclusion in that prestigious list. Let us pray though that it won’t be one of those Comelec election computers.

But aside from having the right to shout to the rest of the world that one’s computing platform is the fastest in the world, what else is there to those supercomputers? From the usual suspects — scientists, engineers, and members of the academe — the answers would include these computers, with their breathtaking computing speeds, can help humans search for cure to the most deadly and dreaded diseases.

Our wisest would add that these supercomputers can help us understand the world’s changing weather patterns; or they can finally help us find proofs that indeed there are more advanced forms of life on other planets, and that they are laughing their heads off right now at our futile and inutile search for extraterrestrial life.

Or perhaps, these computers may one day be fast enough to help us understand ourselves. They might us why we are just as proficient in killing each other as we are building the fastest cars, airplanes, and computers.