<story><title>The 3dfx Voodoo1</title><url>http://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4&amp;#x2F;5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3.&lt;p&gt;What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gok</author><text>Eh, outside of desktop CPUs things have continued to move pretty quickly.&lt;p&gt;Looking at GPUs, the Voodoo3 came out in 1999 and had a fillrate of around 150 MPixels&amp;#x2F;sec. Today&amp;#x27;s GPUs have a fill rate of around 300 times that, which gives an annualized increase of over 30%, for 20 years. This doesn&amp;#x27;t even consider the fact that GPUs went from highly specialized parts to general purpose compute chips.&lt;p&gt;Lower power CPUs are also impressive. 20 years ago the state of the art was the DEC&amp;#x2F;Intel StrongARM. A modern smartphone SOC is around 50x faster than that per watt. If you look at floating point stuff it&amp;#x27;s more like 1000x faster.</text></comment>
<story><title>The 3dfx Voodoo1</title><url>http://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4&amp;#x2F;5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3.&lt;p&gt;What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pornel</author><text>In more recent years the same thing happened in mobile phones and tablets, and then watches.&lt;p&gt;In 5-year spans they all had 10x increase in power, from toy single-core CPUs and GPUs that barely moved pixels on screen, to proper multi-core CPUs and GPUs that would rival your laptop of only they had more thermal headroom.</text></comment>