For a concrete example of what 100x feels like, importing digital camera imagery into a gallery in 1999-2000 was on the order of 10-15 seconds per image (for a

For a concrete example of what 100x feels like, importing digital camera imagery into a gallery in 1999-2000 was on the order of 10-15 seconds per image (for a ~2 MP image, which was current state-of-the-art for resolution). Multi-core and hyperthreading was still years away. PhotoStructure, a self-hosted photo and video manager, uses libvips (a wonderfully performant image library) and is multi-processed and multi-threaded. Typical images are >10x the resolution (24-40MP images are standard from DSLR) yet several are processed in parallel every second.