# How much faster can processors get? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 18, 2007, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455 "2007-01-18T15:19:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/41 "2007-01-19T03:15:10Z")
Oh, I was going to say that even if you meant 16 MHz (16 million hz), that doesn’t sound right. The first commonly-available 16MHz processor, so far as I know, was the Intel 80386. It made its first appearance in a personal computer in 1986, in a Compaq. I remember it well - it was the first time a clone company got ahead of the game on IBM, releasing a more powerful computer than IBM’s own. The beginning of the end of IBM’s dominance of the PC market. The first Compaq 80386 machine was very expensive. It wasn’t until the late 80’s that machines using that processor dropped in price enough that they became relatively common in the home. The 80486 showed up in 1989, and that’s when processor speeds really started to take off. The 80486 started out as a 16 MHz chip, and by the time it was retired it was up to 100 MHz. Intel was still making them as of last year. You don’t find them in home computers, but they are still popular in embedded computers. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/42 "2007-01-19T07:36:27Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] Oh, I was going to say that even if you meant 16 MHz (16 million hz), that doesn’t sound right. The first commonly-available 16MHz processor, so far as I know, was the Intel 80386. It made its first appearance in a personal computer in 1986, in a Compaq. I remember it well - it was the first time a clone company got ahead of the game on IBM, releasing a more powerful computer than IBM’s own. The beginning of the end of IBM’s dominance of the PC market. [/QUOTE] There were a lot of computers before these that were a lot slower. The first Vaxen were about 1 MIPS (millions of instructions per second, or Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed) which used to be the yardstick. (The VAX was defined as 1 MIPS). I’m not quite sure what that translated into as clock speed, since the VAX was a CISC machine, and different instructions took different amounts of time. However I’d better the benchmarks were defined with short, fast instructions to increase the apparent speed. I’ll look at my LGP-21 manual tomorrow when I get to work and post the clock speed of a 1962 vintage computer. Still above 16 hz. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 7:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/43 "2007-01-19T07:44:08Z")
[QUOTE=glee] I bought my first computer in the early 80’s. I have a vague idea the CPU speed was 16 herz. Does that sound right? [/QUOTE] My first computer bought in 1980 had a whopping speed of .895mhz (Motorola 6809e). ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 8:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/44 "2007-01-19T08:59:57Z")
[QUOTE=Voyager] There were a lot of computers before these that were a lot slower. The first Vaxen were about 1 MIPS (millions of instructions per second, or Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed) which used to be the yardstick. (The VAX was defined as 1 MIPS). I’m not quite sure what that translated into as clock speed, since the VAX was a CISC machine, and different instructions took different amounts of time. However I’d better the benchmarks were defined with short, fast instructions to increase the apparent speed. I’ll look at my LGP-21 manual tomorrow when I get to work and post the clock speed of a 1962 vintage computer. Still above 16 hz. 🙂 [/QUOTE] Sure. I used to work with a VAX 11/780 back in the day, which was the 1 MIPS machine. The VAX 1 MIPS compared to about .7 MIPS that the original 8080 could do. To get over 2 MIPS you were into an 80286 running at 12 MHz or more. Today, a Pentium Core2 Extreme processor can hit over 60,000 MIPS. We’ve come a long way, baby. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/45 "2007-01-19T12:09:56Z")
Techie nitpick… m = milli, or 1/1000; M = mega, or 1000000. They are disctict and different. One mHz is one millihertz, or one event every 1000 seconds. One MHz is one megahertz, or one million events per second. You really really don’t want your computer running at 1 mHz\*. [sub]\*Unless its some battery-powered device in a ‘suspend’ mode, where the main clock is stopped and the system is ‘frozen’. This is good for saving battery power, and when you touch a key or whatever, a special circuit restarts the main clock and the rest of the computer springs back to life.[/sub] ---
**Author:** ![David\_Simmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9de053/32.png) [@David\_Simmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_Simmons)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/46 "2007-01-19T17:59:03Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] Here’s another example: One of the drawbacks to video telephony is that people don’t like to be seen in person when they aren’t dressed well, or if they don’t have their makeup on, or if other people in the room don’t want to be seen. Plus there are bandwidth concerns for shipping high res full motion video in real time. Now imagine super powerful processors that can use a camera to read your facial details, store it as a mesh, ship only the mesh to the other side, and then artificially generate ‘you’ in the other computer by taking the mesh, skinning it with a favorite photograph of yourself, and having it be animated in a photorealistic way that’s hard to tell from real life. Now you’re always looking your best. You don’t age. You can locate your avatar in a location of your choosing. I’ve already seen this in research labs. A woman in a bathrobe with her hair up is sitting at a desk talking, and what people see on the other end of the line is the same woman, only now she’s in a business suit talking from behind a conference table. Currently, this takes mucho processing power that desktop computers can’t handle. When they can, you’ll see things like this - and more. [/QUOTE] Yes, we’ve been awaiting such capabilities with bated breath. One possible use for higher speed processors is in the control of nano machines. They have the response time to be able to use higher speed processors. I can see a suite of nano machines that could repair a heart valve in the resting time between beats. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/47 "2007-01-19T18:32:08Z")
> [@](#): > > The big advantage is for the mass of people who don’t want to deal with all the administrative tasks that you need to do on a PC these days. I’d get one for my father-in-law in a second, so I wouldn’t have to be on the phone with him week after week figuring out what setting he screwed up this time. I’m not sure I follow. For the system to be useful, you still need to have some environment accessible to the users where they can run programs. Even if that environment doesn’t live inside the piece of hardware the user lugs around, they must still have access to it, and that’s the environment the clueless are going to screw up. How is bogging down your server space with spyware and other junk any better than bogging down your laptop with the same? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/48 "2007-01-19T22:18:20Z")
[QUOTE=Voyager] I’ll look at my LGP-21 manual tomorrow when I get to work and post the clock speed of a 1962 vintage computer. Still above 16 hz. 🙂 [/QUOTE] Okay, the LGP-21 (manual [here](http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-21-prog-man.html) ) has a four phase instruction execution cycle. On page 3-6 it says the minimum time is 18 \* .4 milliseconds or 7.2 miliseconds., or 138 instructions per second. Worst case is about 8 times that, or about 17 instructions per second. This issue wasn’t clock speed, but that there was no core memory, only a disk, so access times were slow, slow, slow. Not quite 16 hz, but getting there. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2007, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/49 "2007-01-19T22:26:09Z")
[QUOTE=Chronos] I’m not sure I follow. For the system to be useful, you still need to have some environment accessible to the users where they can run programs. Even if that environment doesn’t live inside the piece of hardware the user lugs around, they must still have access to it, and that’s the environment the clueless are going to screw up. How is bogging down your server space with spyware and other junk any better than bogging down your laptop with the same? [/QUOTE] The way we do it where I work is that the applications are shared in the server - not everyone gets his or own copy. If the disk is centrally adminsitered, you’ve got one person running spyware eradication programs, and they’ll do it also. We run Solaris, so this isn’t a problem, but you can see how it would be easier to control. I have access to the file systems. I can change my display settings, and the look and feel of my desktop, and my browser settings. I can wipe out files (but with a centralized backup this is less likely to be a disaster.) The damage I can do is fairly minimal, and fairly easy to recover from. And I never have to reboot. ---
**Author:** ![BJMoose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/5fc32e/32.png) [@BJMoose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BJMoose)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/50 "2007-01-20T20:00:58Z")
Ah, rats. I was going to show off by digging out the sales flyer I have for the TRS-80 (1977), but it doesn’t give the clock speed. It had a Z-80 processor, with 4k ROM and 4k RAM standard (internally expandable to 12k ROM, 16k RAM. with an expansion port that would let you go up to a whopping 62k total memory; the bulk storage device was a $50 cassette recorder). ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/51 "2007-01-20T20:13:23Z")
The TRS-80 Model I had a Z-80 microprocessor chugging along at 1.77 MHz. It was actually a pretty advanced hardware stack for its time. The Apple IIe, which was a main competitor at the time, had a 65C02 processor running at 1.02 MHz. ---
**Author:** ![Myglaren](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f1d935/32.png) [@Myglaren](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Myglaren)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/52 "2007-01-20T22:27:16Z")
There is a Spectrum 48 lurking in my attic that uses the Z80 and I am pretty certain it runs at 4MHz. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/53 "2007-01-21T02:11:15Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] The TRS-80 Model I had a Z-80 microprocessor chugging along at 1.77 MHz. It was actually a pretty advanced hardware stack for its time. [/quote] Are you sure about that speed? I had a 8080A at 2MHz in an IMSAI; the Z80 followed, and the slowest one I recall was 4Mhz, IIRC. A pretty popular board was a S-100 “single board computer”, model “Super Six”, a 6Mhz Z80. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455/54 "2007-01-21T02:36:47Z")
[QUOTE=Musicat] Are you sure about that speed? I had a 8080A at 2MHz in an IMSAI; the Z80 followed, and the slowest one I recall was 4Mhz, IIRC. A pretty popular board was a S-100 “single board computer”, model “Super Six”, a 6Mhz Z80. [/QUOTE] Yep, I’m sure. I remember it well. I had a TRS-80 for several years. I just looked it up on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80), and it agrees with me. All those early machines were between 1 and 2 Mhz. The Apple IIe ran at about 1 Mhz - I remember it because the TRS-80 crowd did a lot of crowing about their faster clock speed. But clock speed isn’t everything - later I had a TRS-80 Color Computer, and despite the fact that it had a slower clock speed than the original TRS-80, I recall that it was significantly faster because it used a more advanced 6809 processor with an internal 16 bit addressing scheme and some 16 bit registers. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-faster-can-processors-get/388455.md?page=2)