When Konrad Zuse built the first working programmable computer, the Z2, in 1939, it could perform around 0.0000065 computations per second per 2023 dollar.201 In 1965, the PDP-8 managed around 1.8 computations per second per dollar. When my book The Age of Intelligent Machines was published in 1990, the MT 486DX could achieve about 1,700. When The Age of Spiritual Machines appeared nine years later, Pentium III CPUs were up to 800,000. And when The Singularity Is Near debuted in 2005, some Pentium 4s were at 12 million. As this book goes to print in early 2024, Google Cloud TPU v5e chips are
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