I'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell that, but I'm not sure what you're doing?" she said looking at the graphs on my screen.
"I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer that filled an entire room, would you believe?"
"That's lovely. How will that help us pay our credit bills?"
Jesting aside. There is a bunch of data for this, like this set here:
And if you extrapolate backwards or find older data, like I did, I came to the conclusion that if I took my PC back to 1981 it would actually be faster than every computer on Earth combined, or some insane statistic like that.
However the Sony Cell had just a PowerPC controlling core. The real magic, and why it was used in supercomputers at the time, is in its Stream cores; they were highly tailored for vector and floating point maths.
"I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer that filled an entire room, would you believe?"
"That's lovely. How will that help us pay our credit bills?"
Jesting aside. There is a bunch of data for this, like this set here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
And if you extrapolate backwards or find older data, like I did, I came to the conclusion that if I took my PC back to 1981 it would actually be faster than every computer on Earth combined, or some insane statistic like that.