[photon_rancher]

What’s the average IPC of these chips for a reasonable workload?

Early processors were typically 1 or lower. Modern stuff is all superscalar piplined and out of order and can do way more than you’d expect. Not to mention SIMD operations and other technologies. Branch prediction is probably better on the new chips too.

And with more RAM and cache algorithms can be chosen with different tradeoffs for less instructions.

16 cores at 4ghz was a thing like a decade ago - chips today might have the same specs but are definitely far faster.

[graycat]

WOW! IPC, instructions per cycle? Sure, back in those days, usually how many cycles per instruction! The 360/91 was a high end thing, said to cost $13 million. One was at the Navy lab, JHU.APL. As I recall, it could do 1 floating point (32 or 64 bits?) instruction per cycle and sometimes 3 in 2 cycles.