[russellbeattie]

Huh... I hadn't considered it before, but Bender's brain could actually be a 6502, just being run at an insanely high clock speed. A few petahertz should be able to handle the AI involved, no?

Planck time is like 10^-43 seconds, so there's lots of room to divvy up a second for more processing power given advanced technologies...

[gregoryl]

If the hardware is advanced enough to do that, the AI software is similarly advanced, and a basic 6502 can produce a Bender like AI without breaking a sweat!

[hvidgaard]

More advanced software would with all likelihood require significant calculations, rendering a basic 6502 useless.

[russellbeattie]

Yeah... Maybe we'd need to bump up the clock to exahertz to make up for the loss of precision and constant memory access. The top super computer is already at 148 petaflops, so we'd need some more headroom for general AI.

Of course, petaherz (10^15 cycles per second) is already the speed at which an electron circles around a hydrogen atom, so we may not be able to use electricity any more...