It’s amazing how far we’ve come in the speed of our computing. While MIPs isn’t a perfect benchmark, as it doesn’t account for the efficiency of the instructions, it will do for our simple comparison. To put the difference the years have made into perspective: 1 second of processing by the current i7 champ would have taken the best 1985 computer over 4 hours 29 minutes! Another fun comparison is that the new iPhone 4S clocks in at about 5,000 MIPs which is faster than a computer from 1999.
| Year | Chip | Millions of Instructions Per Second |
| 1985 | Intel 386DX | 11 MIPS at 33 MHz |
| 1992 | Intel 486DX | 54 MIPS at 66 MHz |
| 1996 | Intel Pentium Pro | 541 MIPS at 200 MHz |
| 1999 | Intel Pentium III | 2,054 MIPS at 600 MHz |
| 2003 | Intel Pentium 4 | 9,726 MIPS at 3.2 GHz |
| 2008 | Intel Core i7 920 | 82,300 MIPS at 2.66 GHz |
| 2011 | Intel Core i7 3960X | 177,730 MIPS at 3.33 GHz |
Here’s another fun comparison: an old 8MB vs a new 8GB (8000MB) memory card:
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