How far has computing power come over the last 40 years? Liberty Games

console power over time

How far has computing power come over the last 40 years? When the renowned Fairchild Channel F hit the scene in 1976, it could more or less do a perfect game of Pong, but consoles and arcade machines have come a long way since then. While there’s no single way to measure the processing powers of consoles and arcade machines, these charts allow for different measurements to be used to show progression over time. The performance indicators are measured in GPU bits, CPU bits, MFLOPS and MIPS.

Short for central processing units, CPU bits performs the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations. As instructions become more complicated, we demand more from the CPU.

KEY

Year	cpu bits							CONSOLE / Arcade machine
Year	0	8	16	32	64	128	256	CONSOLE / Arcade machine

Short for graphics processing units, GPU bits measures the size of the connection between the memory and the GPU. The larger the number, the bigger the connection, the more data it can move.

KEY

Year	gpu bits							CONSOLE / Arcade machine
Year	0	8	16	32	64	128	256	CONSOLE / Arcade machine

Short for million instructions per second, MIPS indicates integer performance, and measures roughly the number of machine instructions that a computer can execute in one second.

KEY

year

mips

CONSOLE / Arcade machine

0.1

100

10k

100k

10m

Short for mega floating-point operations per second, MFLOPs are a common measure of the speed of computers used to perform floating-point calculations.

KEY

year

mflops

CONSOLE / Arcade machine

0.1

100

10k

100k

10m