One second of compute
0
operations / second
since you opened this page: 0
scroll↓
In the time it took you to read this word, a system did two hundred and fifty billion things.
That number is too big to feel. So let's make it feel like something.
If you did one per second
0
years, without sleeping
You'd have started before the wheel. Before writing. Before the first city.
One second of this machine is longer than all of recorded human history, counted out by hand.
Hand it to all of humanity
Give the task to every one of the 8.1 billion people alive.
0
operations, each, every second
Every human on Earth, working in perfect sync, doing thirty-one each. That keeps pace for exactly one second.
Now look up
There are about 250 billion stars in the Milky Way.
One operation for every star in our galaxy. All of them. Once. Every single second.
Closer to home
0
entire human brains
Every neuron, in three human brains, firing at once.
~86 billion neurons each. Three of them. That is one second.
❤
0
human lifetimes of heartbeats
A heart beats roughly 2.8 billion times in a life. This is eighty-five lifetimes of them.
Per second.
Why it matters
At this scale, the gap between a good idea and a wasteful one is measured in millions of dollars a year.
I once found $2.5M of it. About half came from a single line of code, found by understanding the system deeply enough to see the one operation that never needed to happen.
Perspective is the whole job.
Elliott Gregory Dehnbostel