Compare this to the LGP-30, a "small" (desk-sized) vacuum tube computer of the 1950s. It also had just 16 instructions. It nominally had some registers, but these were just locations on the same magnetic drum that stored all the other data.
17ms for a multiplication, wow. Incredible to think that's now the budget for an entire 3D rendered frame.
Like others in this thread I was very skeptical of the SVC16 design, but this real computer feels weirdly unbalanced in the same kind of way. 31-bit instructions, but only 4K words of memory (16KB) in total? 17ms multiplication, but it can also do division? Very strange.