From Newsgroup: comp.arch

On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 18:09:11 +0000, Thomas Koenig wrote:

An interesting question: When (approximately) did the total installed floating point performace of all computers worldwide surpass that of a
single 16-core Zen5 CPU? My guess would be somewhere in the late
1970s/early 1980s, before the PC and the 8087 took off.

I wouldn't want to guess an answer to that question myself.

But when did floating-point performance of the world's computers increase
the most explosively? My guess for _that_ would be when the original 486, later called the 486 DX when the 486 SX arrived, came on the market.

The 8087 was expensive, and only a few people originally bought it for
their PCs because they needed high floating-point performance. The 486, on
the other hand, was the new standard chip if you wanted a PC. It, too, was expensive _at first_, but its price came down, as that of the 386 before
it did.

So about when the 486 got cheap, the performance of all the world's
computers skyrocketed to a level a single computer would be hard pressed
to equal.

John Savard
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