This Netbook and Lego Solves Rubik's Cube in 12s
Still not as fast as a human can do it.
By faster hardware, it could be both stronger physical hardware to manipulate the cube as well as a more capable computational device.
In this video, the creators used Lego Mindstorm bits and an Acer Aspire One netbook to make what is believed to be the fastest solve yet for a computer – 12 seconds.
CubeStormer
Impressive, but can it beat us humans? Not yet.
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6.57 s
There's a Lego web-cam in the center, right behind the cube. All it needs to do is get quick snapshots of the faces of the cube in the software, create a plan to solve it virtually, and send the commands to the servos. My brother has those servos, and they are quite fast.
I am guessing the solving is easy and netbook is really all that is needed, the bottleneck would be the servos moving the cube really.
it probably doesn't require much processor power at all
so that intel atom is most likely overkill for the task
you can wright the software so a web page can solve a cube in milliseconds. a net book dedicated to the task is WAY overkill.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwWDBRQ5rPc