This list compares various amounts of computing power in instructions per second organized by
order of magnitude
In a ratio scale based on powers of ten, the order of magnitude is a measure of the nearness of two figures. Two numbers are "within an order of magnitude" of each other if their ratio is between 1/10 and 10. In other words, the two numbers are ...
in
FLOPS
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
.
__TOC__
Milliscale computing (10−3)
* 2×10
−3: average human multiplication of two 10-digit numbers using pen and paper without aids
Deciscale computing (10−1)
* 1×10
−1: multiplication of two 10-digit numbers by a 1940s electromechanical desk calculator
* 3×10
−1: multiplication on
Zuse Z3 and
Z4, first programmable
digital computers, 1941 and 1945 respectively
* 5×10
−1: computing power of the average human mental calculation for multiplication using pen and paper
Scale computing (100)
* 1.2 OP/S: addition on Z3, 1941, and multiplication on Bell
Model V, 1946
* 2.4 OP/S: addition on Z4, 1945
Decascale computing (101)
* 1.8×10
1:
ENIAC
ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first Computer programming, programmable, Electronics, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was ...
, first programmable electronic digital computer, 1945
* 5×10
1: upper end of serialized human perception computation (light bulbs do not flicker to the human observer)
* 7×10
1:
Whirlwind I
Whirlwind I was a Cold War-era vacuum-tube computer developed by the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the U.S. Navy. Operational in 1951, it was among the first digital electronic computers that operated in real-time for output, and the firs ...
1951 vacuum tube computer and
IBM 1620
The IBM 1620 was a model of scientific minicomputer produced by IBM. It was announced on October 21, 1959, and was then marketed as an inexpensive scientific computer. After a total production of about two thousand machines, it was withdrawn on N ...
1959 transistorized scientific
minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...
Hectoscale computing (102)
* 1.3×10
2:
PDP-4
The PDP-4 was the successor to the Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-1.
History
This 18-bit machine, first shipped in 1962, was a compromise: "with slower memory and different packaging" than the PDP-1, but priced at $65,000 - less than half t ...
commercial minicomputer, 1962
* 2×10
2:
IBM 602 electromechanical calculator (then called computer), 1946
* 6×10
2:
Manchester Mark 1
The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operat ...
electronic general-purpose stored-program digital computer, 1949
Kiloscale computing (103)
* 2×10
3:
UNIVAC I
The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the invento ...
, first American commercially available electronic general-purpose stored program digital computer, 1951
* 3×10
3:
PDP-1
The PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is known for being the most important computer in the creation of hacker culture at the Massachusetts ...
commercial minicomputer, 1959
* 15×10
3:
IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator, 1954
* 24×10
3:
AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central, 1957
* 30×10
3:
IBM 1130
The IBM 1130 Computing System, introduced in 1965, was IBM's least expensive computer at that time. A binary 16-bit machine, it was marketed to price-sensitive, computing-intensive technical markets, like education and engineering, succeeding th ...
commercial minicomputer, 1965
* 40×10
3: multiplication on
Hewlett-Packard 9100A early desktop electronic calculator, 1968
* 53×10
3:
Lincoln TX-2 transistor-based computer, 1958
* 92×10
3:
Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 was part of the 4 chip MCS-4 micro computer set, released by the Intel, Intel Corporation in November 1971; the 4004 being part of the first commercially marketed microprocessor chipset, and the first in a long line of List of I ...
, first commercially available full function
CPU on a chip, released in 1971
* 500×10
3:
Colossus computer
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British cryptanalysis, codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used vacuum tube, thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean algebra ...
vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve (British usage), or tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. It ...
cryptanalytic supercomputer, 1943
Megascale computing (106)
* 1×10
6: computing power of the
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...
commercial computer introduced in 1979.
* 1.2×10
6:
IBM 7030 "Stretch" transistorized supercomputer, 1961
* 5×10
6:
CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the I ...
, first commercially successful supercomputer, 1964
* 11×10
6:
Intel i386
The Intel 386, originally released as the 80386 and later renamed i386, is the third-generation x86 architecture microprocessor from Intel. It was the first 32-bit processor in the line, making it a significant evolution in the x86 archite ...
microprocessor at 33 MHz, 1985
* 14×10
6:
CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was designed by Seymour Cray to be the successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data Corporation, Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz (27.5 ns clock cycle) and had ...
supercomputer, 1967
* 40×10
6:
i486
The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor introduced in 1989. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the i386, Intel 386. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the Inte ...
microprocessor at 50 MHz, 1989
* 86×10
6:
Cray 1 supercomputer, 1978
* 100×10
6:
Pentium (i586) microprocessor, 1993
* 400×10
6:
Cray X-MP
The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray, Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system perfo ...
, 1982
Gigascale computing (109)
* 1×10
9:
ILLIAC IV
The ILLIAC IV was the first massively parallel computer. The system was originally designed to have 256 64-bit floating-point units (FPUs) and four central processing units (CPUs) able to process 1 billion operations per second. Due to budget cons ...
1972 supercomputer does first
computational fluid dynamics
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid dynamics, fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required ...
problems
* 1.4×10
9:
Intel Pentium III
The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999 ...
microprocessor, 1999
* 1.6×10
9:
PowerVR
PowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) that develops hardware and software for 2D and 3D rendering, and for video encoding, video decoding, decoding, associated image processing and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and ...
MBX Lite 3D
GPU
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...
on
iPhone 1, 2007
* 8×10
9: PowerVR SGX535 GPU on
iPad 1, 2010
* 136×10
9: PowerVR GXA6450 GPU on
iPhone 6
The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are smartphones that were developed and marketed by Apple Inc. They are the eighth generation of the iPhone, succeeding the iPhone 5, iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s, and were announced on September 9, 2014, and rel ...
and
iPhone SE, 2014
* 148×10
9:
Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition commercial computing 2010
Terascale computing (1012)
* 1.34×10
12:
Intel ASCI Red 1997 supercomputer
* 1.344×10
12 GeForce GTX 480 in 2010 from Nvidia at its peak performance
* 2.15×10
12:
iPhone 15 Pro
The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are smartphones that were developed and marketed by Apple Inc. They are the seventeenth-generation flagship iPhones, succeeding the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max.
The devices were unveiled alongside the ...
September 2023
A17 Pro processor
* 4.64×10
12:
Radeon HD 5970 in 2009 from
AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...
(under ATI branding) at its peak performance
* 5.152×10
12:
S2050/S2070 1U GPU Computing System from Nvidia
* 11.3×10
12:
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in 2017
* 13.7×10
12:
Radeon RX Vega 64 in 2017
* 15.0×10
12:
Nvidia Titan V in 2017
* 80×10
12:
IBM Watson
IBM Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It was developed as a part of IBM's DeepQA project by a research team, led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's fou ...
* 170×10
12:
Nvidia DGX-1 The initial Pascal based DGX-1 delivered 170 teraflops of half precision processing.
* 478.2×10
12 IBM
BlueGene/L 2007 Supercomputer
* 960×10
12 Nvidia DGX-1 The Volta-based upgrade increased calculation power of
Nvidia DGX-1 to 960
teraflop
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...
s.
Petascale computing (1015)
* 1.026×10
15:
IBM Roadrunner
Roadrunner was a supercomputer built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The US$100-million Roadrunner was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. It achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25, 2008, to become t ...
2009 Supercomputer
* 1.32×10
15:
Nvidia GeForce 40 series' RTX 4090 consumer graphics card achieves 1.32 petaflops in AI applications, October 2022
* 2×10
15:
Nvidia DGX-2 a 2 Petaflop Machine Learning system (the newer
DGX A100 has 5 Petaflop performance)
* 11.5×10
15:
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
TPU pod containing 64 second-generation TPUs, May 2017
* 17.17×10
15:
IBM Sequoia's LINPACK performance, June 2013
[ ]
* 20×10
15: roughly the hardware-equivalent of the human brain according to
Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, text-to-speech synthesis, spee ...
. Published in his 1999 book: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
* 33.86×10
15:
Tianhe-2
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86- petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
It was the world's fastest supercomputer ...
's LINPACK performance, June 2013
* 36.8×10
15: 2001 estimate of computational power required to ''simulate'' a human brain in real time.
* 93.01×10
15:
Sunway TaihuLight
The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese supercomputer which, , is ranked 11th in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake ...
's LINPACK performance, June 2016
[http://top500.org/list/2016/06/ Top500 list, June 2016]
*143.5×10
15:
Summit's LINPACK performance, November 2018
Exascale computing (1018)
* 1×10
18:
Fugaku 2020 Japanese supercomputer in single precision mode
* 1.1x10
18:
Frontier
A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary.
Australia
The term "frontier" was frequently used in colonial Australia in the meaning of country that borders the unknown or uncivilised, th ...
2022 U.S. supercomputer
* 1.72×10
18: operations per second of
El Capitan
El Capitan (; ) is a vertical Rock formations in the United States, rock formation in Yosemite National Park, on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. The El Capitan Granite, granite monolith is about from base to summit alo ...
, the fastest
non-distributed supercomputer in the world as of November 2024
* 1.88×10
18: U.S. Summit achieves a peak throughput of this many operations per second, whilst analysing genomic data using a mixture of numerical precisions.
* 2.43×10
18:
Folding@home
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements ...
distributed computing system during
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
response
Zettascale computing (1021)
* 1×10
21: Accurate global weather estimation on the scale of approximately 2 weeks. Assuming
Moore's law
Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...
remains applicable, such systems may be feasible around 2035.
A zettascale computer system could generate more single floating point data in one second than was stored by any digital means on Earth in the first quarter of 2011.
Beyond zettascale computing (>1021)
*1.12×10
36: Estimated computational power of a
Matrioshka brain, assuming 1.87×10
26 watt
The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of Power (physics), power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantification (science), quantify the rate of Work ...
power produced by solar panels and 6
GFLOPS/watt efficiency.
*4×10
48: Estimated computational power of a Matrioshka brain whose power source is the
Sun
The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...
, the outermost layer operates at 10
kelvin
The kelvin (symbol: K) is the base unit for temperature in the International System of Units (SI). The Kelvin scale is an absolute temperature scale that starts at the lowest possible temperature (absolute zero), taken to be 0 K. By de ...
s, and the constituent parts operate at or near the
Landauer limit and draws power at the efficiency of a
Carnot engine
A Carnot heat engine is a theoretical heat engine that operates on the Carnot cycle. The basic model for this engine was developed by Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot in 1824. The Carnot engine model was graphically expanded by Benoît Paul Émile ...
*5×10
58: Estimated power of a
galaxy
A galaxy is a Physical system, system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar medium, interstellar gas, cosmic dust, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Ancient Greek, Greek ' (), literally 'milky', ...
equivalent in luminosity to the
Milky Way
The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the #Appearance, galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galax ...
converted into Matrioshka brains.
See also
*
Futures studies
Futures studies, futures research or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social and technological advancement, and other environmental trends, often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and wor ...
– study of possible, probable, and preferable futures, including making projections of future technological advances
*
History of computing hardware (1960s–present)
The history of computing hardware starting at 1960 is marked by the conversion from vacuum tube to solid-state electronics, solid-state devices such as transistors and then integrated circuit (IC) chips. Around 1953 to 1959, discrete transistors ...
*
List of emerging technologies
This is a list of emerging technologies, which are emerging technologies, in-development technical innovations that have significant potential in their applications. The criteria for this list is that the technology must:
# Exist in some way; ...
– new fields of technology, typically on the cutting edge. Examples include genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology (GNR)
**
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
– computer mental abilities, especially those that previously belonged only to humans, such as
speech recognition
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...
,
natural language generation
Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. A widely cited survey of NLG methods describes NLG as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that is concerned with the ...
, etc.
***
History of artificial intelligence
The history of artificial intelligence ( AI) began in antiquity, with myths, stories, and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. The study of logic and formal reasoning from antiquity to t ...
(AI)
***
Strong AI – hypothetical AI as smart as a human
**
Quantum computing
A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using s ...
***
Timeline of quantum computing and communication
A timeline is a list of events displayed in chronological order. It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labelled with dates paralleling it, and usually contemporaneous events.
Timelines can use any suitable scale representing t ...
*
Moore's law
Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...
– observation (not actually a
law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the ar ...
) that, over the
history of computing hardware
The history of computing hardware spans the developments from early devices used for simple calculations to today's complex computers, encompassing advancements in both analog and digital technology.
The first aids to computation were purely mec ...
, the number of
transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch electrical signals and electric power, power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semicondu ...
s on
integrated circuit
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
s doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder
Gordon Moore
Gordon Earle Moore (January 3, 1929 – March 24, 2023) was an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and emeritus chairman of Intel Corporation. He proposed Moore's law which makes the observation that the number of transistors i ...
, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.
*
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
**
History of supercomputing
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC ...
*
Superintelligence
A superintelligence is a hypothetical intelligent agent, agent that possesses intelligence surpassing that of the brightest and most intellectual giftedness, gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of advanced problem- ...
*
Timeline of computing
*
Technological singularity
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the ...
– hypothetical point in the future when computer capacity rivals that of a human brain, enabling the development of
strong AI — artificial intelligence at least as smart as a human
** ''
The Singularity Is Near
''The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology'' is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. A sequel book, '' The Singularity Is Nearer'', was released on J ...
'' – book by
Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition te ...
dealing with the progression and projections of development of computer capabilities, including beyond human levels of performance
*
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...
– list of the 500 most powerful (non-distributed) computer systems in the world
References
External links
Historical and projected growth in supercomputer capacity
{{DEFAULTSORT:Orders Of Magnitude (Computing)
Computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...
*