Floating point ops used to take a while. A 16Mhz Amiga with a floating point co-processor might have had one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68

Floating point ops used to take a while. A 16Mhz Amiga with a floating point co-processor might have had one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881 Yeah, 16 Mhz ==> 160 KFlops, if you believe wikipedia. Supposedly the i7 has a peak of 79 GFlops. Sure, you can't get all of that performance out (either then, or now), but 79,000,000 / 160 is a bit larger than 143. You used to measure the number of cycles an integer multiply costed, in the dozens or hundreds. Now it takes 1/4 of a cycle. A factor of 10,000 might be a fairer number