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It is astounding. What is more astounding to me is that we burn so many of these cycles on eye candy, and that we waste so many of them on bloat. If not for that your battery powered gizmo would run for many days on one charge instead of having to be connected to its umbilical for 8 hours every night.

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If that’s astounding think about what most of us spend our time doing with the insane amount of processing power available between our ears.

Sure, but we didn't engineer that with performance in mind, and with computers it was enough to declare a previous generation obsolete. Whereas productivity for computer based applications was actually pretty good for the first generation of those machines, pretty much every cycle counted. Some people used them to play games and there was a recreational element to programming in its own right but it wasn't as though anybody would burn cycles to give a UI the texture of the real thing, it was a computer that worked and it produced results, which was all that mattered.

most of that processing power is unfortunately special purpose and can't be easily repurposed for something else. We have very good vision processing, but it is not like you can entirely high-jack that for something else.

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