Neha Patil (Editor)

Computer performance by orders of magnitude

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This list compares various amounts of computing power in instructions per second organized by order of magnitude in FLOPS.

Contents

Hectoscale computing (102)

  • 2.2×102 Upper end of serialized human through put. This is roughly expressed by the lower limit of accurate event placement on small scales of time (The swing of a conductor's arm, the reaction time to lights on a drag strip, etc.)
  • 2×102 IBM 602 1946 computer.

    • Kiloscale computing (103)

  • 92×103 Intel 4004 First commercially available full function CPU on a chip, released in 1971
  • 500×103 Colossus computer vacuum tube supercomputer 1943

    • Megascale computing (106)

  • 1×106 Motorola 68000 commercial computing 1979
  • 1.2×106 IBM 7030 "Stretch" transistorized supercomputer 1961

    • Gigascale computing (109)

  • 1×109 ILLIAC IV 1972 supercomputer does first computational fluid dynamics problems
  • 1.354×109 Intel Pentium III commercial computing 1999
  • 147.6×109 Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition commercial computing 2010

    • Terascale computing (1012)

  • 1.34×1012 Intel ASCI Red 1997 Supercomputer
  • 1.344×1012 GeForce GTX 480 from NVIDIA at its peak performance
  • 4.64×1012 Radeon HD 5970 from ATI at its peak performance
  • 5.152×1012 S2050/S2070 1U GPU Computing System from NVIDIA
  • 80×1012 IBM Watson

    • Petascale computing (1015)

  • 1.026×1015 IBM Roadrunner 2009 Supercomputer
  • 8.1×1015 Fastest computer system as of 2012 is the Folding@home distributed computing system
  • 17.17×1015 IBM Sequoia's Linpack performance, June 2013
  • 33.86×1015 Tianhe-2's Linpack performance, June 2013
  • 36.8×1015 Estimated computational power required to simulate a human brain in real time.
  • 93.01×1015 Sunway TaihuLight's Linpack performance, June 2016

    • Exascale computing (1018)

  • 1×1018 It is estimated that the need for exascale computing will become pressing around 2018
  • 1.5×1018 Bitcoin network Hash Rate reached 1.5 Exahashes per seconds in mid 2016

    • Zettascale computing (1021)

  • 1×1021 Accurate global weather estimation on the scale of approximately 2 weeks. Assuming Moore's law remains constant, such systems may be feasible around 2030.

    • A zettascale computer system could generate more single floating point data in one second than was stored by any digital means on Earth in first quarter 2011.

    Yottascale computing (1024)

  • 257.6×1024 Estimated computational power required to simulate 7 billion brains in real time

    • References

    Computer performance by orders of magnitude Wikipedia
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