Answer
See explanation
Work Step by Step
Modern computer:
Processor Intel Core i7 or Apple M3 (8 cores @ 3.0 GHz)
Cost ≈ \$1,200 USD
Processing Speed (GIPS) ~90–120 GIPS (billions of instructions per second)
Computational Speed (GFLOPS) ~300–500 GFLOPS (billions of floating-point operations per second)
Primary Memory (RAM) 16 GB (= 16 × 10⁹ bytes)
Let's make a historical comparison:
Generation 1st Gen
UNIVAC I Year 1951 Speed ~0.000001 GIPS (≈ 1,000 instr/sec) Memory: 1 KB Cost ~\$1 million
2nd Gen:
IBM 1401 Year~1959 Speed ~0.0001 GIPS (≈ 100,000 instr/sec) Memory 4–16 KB Cost ~\$500,000
3rd Gen:
IBM System/360 Year ~1964 Speed ~0.001 GIPS (≈ 1 million instr/sec) Memory 64–256 KB Cost ~\$1 million
Percentage Improvement (Modern vs. Early 1950s)
Let’s compare processing speed and memory.
1) Processing Speed Improvement
100 GIPS/0.000001 GIPS = 100 trillion times faster = $10^{14}$
→ 14 orders of magnitude faster
2) Computational Speed (GFLOPS)
UNIVAC I ≈ 0.000001 GFLOPS
Modern PC ≈ 400 GFLOPS
→ Improvement = ≈ 4 × 10¹¹ times
3) Primary Memory Improvement
16 GB/1 KB = $16×10^9/10^3=16\times 10^6$
→ ≈ 16 million times larger
4) Cost per performance
UNIVAC I: \$1 million for 1 k instr/sec → \$1,000 per instr/sec
Modern PC: \$1,200 for 100 billion instr/sec → \$1.2 × 10⁻⁸ per instr/sec
→ Cost efficiency improved by roughly 10¹¹–10¹²×
A modern personal computer is hundreds of billions of times faster, has millions of times more memory, and is thousands of times cheaper than the first commercial computers of the early 1950s.
