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

  • @drspod@lemmy.ml
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    11 month ago

    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.

    • BeardyGrumpsOP
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      21 month ago

      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.