A typical modern CPU can retire 2-3 instructions per clock, per core. Somewhat more due to hyper-threading, so maybe 5 per clock per core. So a 3 GHz, 8-core pr

A typical modern CPU can retire 2-3 instructions per clock, per core. Somewhat more due to hyper-threading, so maybe 5 per clock per core. So a 3 GHz, 8-core processor for 9 seconds is 5i x 3Ghz x 8c x 9s = 1 trillion instructions. Divide by 1KB to get roughly 1 billion instructions per character. SIMD is a little unfair, because virtually none of what an app like Teams does is amenable to vectorisation. If we allow SIMD, then we have to allow the GPU, and then we're talking about an entire different order of magnitude. A decent last-gen GPU has something like 30 teraflops, so about 265 billion instructions per displayed character!