How much your computer can do in a second

Pretty cool, but a number of the questions are totally unknowable. For instance the question about web requests to google. Depending on your internet connection you've got more than a order of magnitude difference in the outcome. In the question about SSD performance the only hint we have is that the computer has "an SSD", but a modern PCIe SSD like in the new Macbook pro is over 10 times faster than the SSDs we got just 5 years ago…

Alternatively: do you know how much your computer could do in a second, but isn't, because the majority of software is so full of inefficiency? In my experience, this is something that a lot of developers don't really comprehend. Many of them will have some idea about theoretical time complexity, but then see nothing wrong with what should be a very trivial operation taking several seconds of CPU time on a modern computer. One of the things I like to…

I like to test people’s intuition of computer power by asking them how many multiplications their phone or PC can make in the time it takes light to cross the room. The way to estimate this is that light takes 3ns to go 1m. If the room is 10m wide, that’s 30ns. At typical frequencies that’s 100 clocks. With, say, 8 cores that’s 800 steps. At each step a core can retire about 8 multiplies using AVX vector instructions. The…