CPU Performance Comparisons
Commenters debate the extent of CPU speed, memory, and overall computing power improvements over the past 10-30 years, comparing modern devices like laptops and phones to historical PCs and supercomputers while addressing perceptions of stagnation due to software bloat.
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Haven't the speed of CPU and memory flipped since then?
Can you provide some evidence that “CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years?”
You imply that computing of ten years ago was arguably worse than what we have today. In what way?
Still crazy to think that the phones we have now are as powerful as the supercomputers in the 80s. Wonder when our computers will reach these speeds.
I've experienced this. My first computer managed about 100 flop/s, or 3 Gflop/year. A modern PC can do that year's work in a millisecond! Yet when my current computer struggles to display a web page there isn't much interesting computation going on.
Not anymore, but it's only recently that that's been spun as a good thing.Tell someone around 2000 that a 7ish year old PC would be adequate and you'd get laughed at. 1993 to 2000, for instance: You'd be comparing a Pentium at 60Mhz (some quick googling says 60Mhz was first hit this year) on the high end to a 1Ghz Athlon. Probably >20x real performance improvement (the clock alone is 16.7x).Mobile devices will catch up and stagnate too, sadly.
15 years ago the average PC had a CPU < 1 GHz and less than 1 GB of memory. Everything is relative.
This is silly, general computing has been done forever in lesser processors.
Just go 9 years back actually. Computers were 20x slower 9 years ago according to Moore's law
Computers used to evolve much more quickly... Or at least the improvements made a much bigger difference