Not necessarily if you can parallelize computing the digits. Your average Pentium processor can compute a floating-point number with a mantissa of 16 decimal o

Not necessarily if you can parallelize computing the digits. Your average Pentium processor can compute a floating-point number with a mantissa of 16 decimal or 52 binary digits in one clock cycle, not 16 or 52. It does so by using enough silicon to compute them all in parallel.