A Quadrillion Mainframes on Your Lap
Your laptop is way more powerful than you might realize
Whenever I hear someone rhapsodize about how much more computer power
we have now compared with what was available in the 1960s during the
Apollo era, I cringe. Those comparisons usually grossly underestimate
the difference.
By 1961, a few universities around the world had bought IBM 7090
mainframes. The 7090 was the first line of all-transistor computers,
and it cost US $20 million in today's money, or about 6,000 times as
much as a top-of-the-line laptop today. Its early buyers typically
deployed the computers as a shared resource for an entire campus. Very
few users were fortunate enough to get as much as an hour of computer
time per week.
The 7090 had a clock cycle of 2.18 microseconds, so the operating
frequency was just under 500 kilohertz. But in those days,
instructions were not pipelined, so most took more than one cycle to
execute. Some integer arithmetic took up to 14 cycles, and a
floating-point operation could hog up to 15. So the 7090 is generally
estimated to have executed about 100,000 instructions per second. Most
modern computer cores can operate at a sustained rate of 3 billion
instructions per second, with much faster peak speeds. That is 30,000
times as fast, so a modern chip with four or eight cores is easily
100,000 times as fast.
Unlike the lucky person in 1961 who got an hour of computer time, you
can run your laptop all the time, racking up more than 1,900 years of
7090 computer time every week. (Far be it from me to ask how many of
those hours are spent on Minecraft.)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-mainframe
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