Orders of magnitude (computing)

This list compares various amounts of computing power in instructions per second organized by order of magnitude.

Scientific E notation index: -1 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 | 18 | 24

10⁰

Biological Computation

• 5.2×10⁰ World record for addition

10²

Faster than animal perception computation begins

• 2.2×10² Upper end of serialized human through put. This is roughly expressed by the lower limit of accurate event placement on small scales of time (The swing of a conductors arm, the reaction time to lights on a drag strip etc.)
• 2×10² IBM 602 1946 computer.

10³

Kilo scale computing

• 9.2×10⁴ Intel 4004 First commercially available full function CPU on a chip 1971
• 5×10⁵ Colossus computer vacuum tube supercomputer 1943

10⁶

Mega scale computing

• 1×10⁶ Motorola 68000 commercial computing 1979
• 1.2×10⁶ IBM 7030 "Stretch" Vacuum tube supercomputer 1961

10⁹

Giga scale computing

• 1×10⁹ ILLIAC IV 1972 supercomputer does first computational fluid dynamics problems
• 1.354×10⁹ Intel Pentium III commercial computing 1999
• 147.6×10⁹ Intel Core-i7 980X Extreme Edition commercial computing 2010

10¹²

Tera scale computing

• 1.34×10¹² Intel ASCI Red 1997 Supercomputer
• 1.344×10¹² GeForce GTX 480 from NVIDIA at its peak performance
• 4.64×10¹² Radeon HD 5970 from ATI at its peak performance
• 5.152×10¹² S2050/S2070 1U GPU Computing System from NVIDIA
• 80×10¹² IBM Watson
• 100×10¹² Estimated parallelized throughput of the human brain^{[citation needed]}

10¹⁵

Petascale computing

• 1.026×10¹⁵ IBM Roadrunner 2009 Supercomputer
• 8.1×10¹⁵ Fastest computer system as of 2012 is the Folding@home distributed computing system
• 20×10¹⁵ IBM Sequoia Circa 2011
• 36.8×10¹⁵ Estimated computational power required to simulate a human brain in real time.

10¹⁸

Exascale computing

• 1×10¹⁸ It is estimated that the need for exascale computing will become pressing around 2018

10²¹

Zetta scale computing

• 1×10²¹ Accurate global weather estimation on the scale of approximately 2 weeks. Assuming Moore's law remains constant, such systems may be feasible around 2030.

A zettascale computer system could generate more single floating point data in one second than was stored by any digital means on Earth in first quarter 2011.