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Oligopsony comments on Question about brains and big numbers - Less Wrong
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The switching rate in a processor is faster than the firing rate of neurons.
All else being equal, a computer should be faster than an aggregate of neurons. But all isn't equal, even when comparing different processors. Comparing transistors in a modern processor to synapses in a human brain yields many more synapses than transistors. Furthermore, the brain is massively parallel, and has a specialized architecture. For what it does, it's well optimized, at least compared to how optimized our software and hardware are for similar tasks at this point.
For instance, laptop processors are general purpose processors, being able to do many different tasks they aren't really fast or good at any. Some specific tasks may make use of custom made processors, which, even if their clock rate is slower, or if they have less transistors, will still vastly outperform a general purpose processor if they are to compete for the task they were custom-built for.
Intuitively this doesn't seem right at all: I can think of plenty of things that a human plus an external memory aid (like a pencil + paper) can do that a laptop can't, but (aside from dumb hardware stuff like "connect to the internet" and so on) I can't think of anything for which the reverse is true; while I can think of plenty of things that they both can do, but a laptop can do much faster. Or am I misinterpreting you?
I'm not sure I understand your question.
I guess part of my point is that a laptop processor is a very general purpose tool, while the human brain is a collection of specialized modules. Also, the more general a tool is, the less efficient it will be on average for any task.
The human brain might be seen as a generalist, but not in the same way a laptop computer processor is.
Besides, even a laptop processor has certain specializations and advantages over the human brain in certain narrow domains, like for instance among others, number crunching and fast arithmetic operations.