Amazing Fact of the Day
from BeardyGrumps@lemmy.dbzer0.com to gaming@beehaw.org on 17 May 23:49
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/44536892

The combined computing power of **every ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 ever sold — over 22 million machines — is still 47,000 times weaker than a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU.

Those iconic 8-bit legends that shaped the childhoods (and careers) of millions delivered about 0.0022 TFLOPS of raw compute power — together. Meanwhile, the RTX 5090, built for today’s AI and graphics workloads, pushes 104.8 TFLOPS on its own.

What a time to be alive.

#TechEvolution #AI #GPUs #ZXSpectrum #Commodore64 #NVIDIA #RTX5090 #ComputingHistory #ExponentialGrowth

#gaming

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Corngood@lemmy.ml on 18 May 00:23 next collapse

That’s crazy.

Since GPUs got into the TFLOP range I often think of this old magazine cover:

images.computerhistory.org/…/500004286-03-01.jpg?…

BeardyGrumps@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 May 08:30 collapse

Love that! Thanks for sharing.

sxan@midwest.social on 18 May 01:07 next collapse

The games on those old computers were better, too, proving you can’t make something good just by throwing power at it. Emulators are popular for a reason.

BeardyGrumps@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 May 08:29 collapse

Agree with you; there’s some classics from the 8 bit era and its a cool project to build your own way back emulation machine. I did one 8 years ago and I put it into an arcade cabinet. It gets used at parties as everyone can pick up and have a go.

sxan@midwest.social on 18 May 10:57 collapse

That’s fantastic. One of the best moments in my life was discovering a comprehensive archive of Apple ][ game images. So. Many. Games. So many, sometimes it’s hard to find a specific one if you remember the game but not the name.

drspod@lemmy.ml on 18 May 11:21 collapse

It’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, because the Spectrum and C64 were general purpose computing devices that ran a single program at once, whereas the 5090 is not designed to be a general purpose computer, but a massively parallel acceleration card with a pipeline designed primarily for 3D graphics rendering.

A better comparison would be to a modern general purpose computing device, like a smartphone or desktop PC.

BeardyGrumps@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 May 15:57 collapse

You have a valid point but I was purely interested in raw compute power. It was just a thought experiment that turned into a bit of research.