leaking pen wrote:
as for speed,
the intel 80286 chip, released in 1982 was 6 mhz. high end pcs these
days are 3 ghz. about 500 times faster.
It is much more than that! I measured an increase of ~500 times
between 1980 and 1995. The clock speed is not the only factor. CPUs
were converted to RISC architecture, then optimized (pipelined and so
on), and then multiplied. Hard disk speeds are now faster than RAM
used to be. Video is faster and has taken some of the workload off of the CPU.
Also, microcomputer history did not begin with the IBM PC. It began
with things like the 8080 and the Zilog Z80, which were marvelous but
slow. I recall kilohertz clock speeds.
Naturally, it depends upon the type of benchmark your running. Some
processes have hardly increased in speed. But for integer computation
benchmarks 5,000 to 10,000 is a reasonable guess. Here is a document
that confirms it:
http://www.ce.chalmers.se/research/group/hpcag/publ/2004/EWN04/performancegrowth_tr-2004-9.pdf
- Jed
