[dllthomas]

Why would we expect to need a full modern CPU? An 8080 had thousands, and that's still general purpose. Something built for a specific task might well be substantially smaller. Still slow, but possibly realistic for some tasks.

[mikeash]

It's a long way from even an 8080. The 8080 had a couple thousand gates and ran at 2+MHz. At 50 gates per second, this would run an 8080 at maybe 20 millihertz.

[dllthomas]

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it'll happily emulate an 8080 at useful speeds. I wanted to illustrate the orders of magnitude between "minimal something useful" and "a modern cpu", and an 8080 is a reasonably familiar point on that spectrum.

Anything you can do in 10 or 20 cycles of an 8080, you can now do to secret data in a few hours. And you can probably do much, much faster than that if you design a special purpose circuit. It's still sloooow by the computational standards we're used to. But it might be fast enough that there are useful applications.

[mikeash]

Makes sense. I am definitely excited to see something that even vaguely approaches practicality, even if it's a long way from megaflop territory.