There was an interesting discussion on Quora about this recently[0] The most relevant quote being perhaps: "The magic of the brain is not the number of neurons, but how the circuits are wired and how they function dynamically. If you put 1 billion transistors together, you don't get a functioning CPU. And if you put 100 billion neurons together, you don't get an intelligent brain." 0. http://www.quora.com/How-big-is-…
EDIT: Mistyped number of cores. 1000, not 100.