By 1980 the workstation market was thinking about 3M: A megabyte of memory (RAM), a megapixel display and a million instructions per second (all for less than a "megapenny").
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
OK, the machines of 1980 we're desktop sized rather than room sized, but, as Foone points out, the 7090 was also really a single-user (at a time) machine.
These days you can get a similar spec (within approximately an order of magnitude) in an Arduino: 8,000 or 16,000 kHz with 32kB (rather than the 7090's 144kB) of RAM.
Moore's law is strong but the applications are varied and sometimes the form factor is what changes the game rather than the raw specs.
The 360/91, still in the punched card days, had a 60 ns cycle time. So that is
60 x 10^(-9)
seconds per cycle or
(1/60) x 10^(9)
Hz or 17 MHz. Not so shabby!
It read memory 64 bits at a time interleaved 64 ways. And it had IRCC 8 locations of 64 bits each of an instruction cache. Some loops could fit in the cache at which time the machine would go into loop mode.
> These days you can get a similar spec (within approximately an order of magnitude) in an Arduino: 8,000 or 16,000 kHz with 32kB (rather than the 7090's 144kB) of RAM.
That's 32K of flash memory, not general purpose RAM - the ATMega328 has only 2K of actual general purpose RAM (also, the ATMega series is also a mostly Harvard architecture - but I don't know what the 7090 was).
If you wanted something closer to the 7090, the Arduino Mega (ATMega2560) with a RAM extension upgrade (because the 2560 only has 8k of RAM) would be a better comparison (if you wanted to stick with the Arduino microcontroller comparison).
That's actually really fast for 1962.
By 1980 the workstation market was thinking about 3M: A megabyte of memory (RAM), a megapixel display and a million instructions per second (all for less than a "megapenny"). -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
OK, the machines of 1980 we're desktop sized rather than room sized, but, as Foone points out, the 7090 was also really a single-user (at a time) machine.
These days you can get a similar spec (within approximately an order of magnitude) in an Arduino: 8,000 or 16,000 kHz with 32kB (rather than the 7090's 144kB) of RAM.
Moore's law is strong but the applications are varied and sometimes the form factor is what changes the game rather than the raw specs.