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Amazing Fact of the Day (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

The combined computing power of **every ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 ever sold โ€” over 22 million machines โ€” 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 โ€” 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

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[-] sxan@midwest.social 11 points 3 days ago

The games on those old computers were better, too, proving you can't make something good just by throwing power at it. Emulators are popular for a reason.

[-] BeardyGrumps@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

Agree with you; there's some classics from the 8 bit era and its a cool project to build your own way back emulation machine. I did one 8 years ago and I put it into an arcade cabinet. It gets used at parties as everyone can pick up and have a go.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 3 days ago

That's fantastic. One of the best moments in my life was discovering a comprehensive archive of Apple ][ game images. So. Many. Games. So many, sometimes it's hard to find a specific one if you remember the game but not the name.

[-] Corngood@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

That's crazy.

Since GPUs got into the TFLOP range I often think of this old magazine cover:

https://images.computerhistory.org/revonline/images/500004286-03-01.jpg?w=600

[-] BeardyGrumps@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago

Love that! Thanks for sharing.

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days 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.

[-] BeardyGrumps@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days 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.

this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
24 points (100.0% liked)

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