The combined computing power of **every ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 ever sold — over 22 million machines — 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 — 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
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.
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.
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.
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
Love that! Thanks for sharing.
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.
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.
