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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of fun technical rundowns, I've idly wondered:

- Approximately which year's average desktop PC is equivalent to a current Raspberry Pi?

- What year's worldwide computing power is equivalent to a current Raspberry Pi?

I'm sure folks can come up with other comparisons to make. I know it's not very useful to the world, but it's fun to think of just how much astonishing compute power we have these days.

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For the first question, probably somewhere in the mid-2000s. Maybe early Core microarchitecture.

I'll give you a mid-2000s Celeron, before core, except 4 of them because it's a quad core, and with a few times more RAM since you can get pis with up to 4GB now. I had a 1.8Ghz single-core celeron with 512MB of RAM in 2005, upgraded to 3.0GHz with 768MB by 2006, then leaped to a Q6600/4GB in 2007. Not sure how my Radeon 9200 and later X1600 would've compared to the Pi GPU though.

This guy puts the rpi 4's GPU at 8 GFLOPS:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244519

Looks like the X1600 was around 6 GFLOPS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin...

You could do dual socket on Socket370, don’t know about quads though

- How many Apollo 11 guidance computers would you need to run Doom?

I believe you require a 32 bit computer and I think those were 15. So no doom :(

Though, where there's a will there's a way...

https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/16-bit

>After the release of Doom II on the PC, the original three episodes were released to some 16-bit consoles that used special 32-bit enhancement hardware. For the Sega Genesis, the 32X allowed for additional address space to enable Doom to run its demanding resources of the time which a 16-bit system wouldn't have handled. Whereas with the SNES, the Super FX 2 chip inside the DOOM cartridge allowed for an internal co-processor of the game cartridge to eliminate the need for bulky addons for the aging SNES.

Would it count if you somehow built in a 32-bit coprocessor for your 15-bit apollo doom port?

Question was could it do it which it can’t. But yeah you could use the Apollo for controller IO and put the rest on a raspberry pi but that kinda defeats the purpose.

But the data width is the least of concerns anyway. You should realize a 15 bit computer can compute everything a 32 bit can?

The bigger problems are more pedestrian like complete lack of suitable IO.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community and we want it to remain one. For that, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

You needn't use your real name, of course.

So you'd need 2.13 of them is what you're saying.

My idly wondering one day was when in history did the worldwide available compute power (roughly) equal that of my iPhone 11?

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