It’s amazing how far we’ve come in the speed of our computing. While the number of instructions a CPU can process in a second 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 Intel’s (2011) i7 3960X would have taken the best 1985 personal computer over 4 hours 29 minutes!
| 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 |
| iPhone 4S | ~5,000 MIPS | |
| 2003 | Intel Pentium 4 | 9,726 MIPS at 3.2 GHz |
| iPhone 5S | ~20,500 MIPS | |
| iPhone 6 | ~25,000 MIPS | |
| 2006 | Intel Core 2 X6800 (2 core) | 27,079 MIPS at 2.93 GHz |
| 2006 | Intel Core 2 QX6700 (4 core) | 49,161 MIPS at 2.66 GHz |
| 2008 | Intel Core i7 920 (4 core) | 82,300 MIPS at 2.66 GHz |
| 2011 | Intel Core i7 3960X (6 core) | 177,730 MIPS at 3.33 GHz |
| 2013 | Intel Core i7 4770K (4 core) | 133,740 MIPS at 3.9 GHz |
| 2014 | Intel Core i7 5960X (8 core) | 238,310 MIPS at 3.0 GHz |
| 2015 | Intel Core i7 6700K (4 core) | ~161,173 MIPS at 4.0 GHz |
Note: Due to Apple’s obsession with secrecy the iPhone numbers are approximations based on custom utilities and not official. The i7 6700K was just announced last week so benchmarks aren’t available yet, but Intel claims it is 20% faster than the i7 4770K.