[duskwuff]

18 MHz, actually -- the FPGA clock speed is 73 MHz, but it executes the equivalent of one 6502 clock cycle in four of its clocks.

That being said, this was implemented on a budget-line FPGA from 2006 (XC3S50A - a small Xilinx Spartan-3A). A modern performance-line FPGA would probably hit a couple hundred MHz easily.

[baybal2]

It's still surprising how little relatively to the level of perceived performance have IPC count improved since seventies.

[cmrdporcupine]

It seems to me that computational throughput has improved exponentially, but latency for input tasks etc. has in fact worsened in many cases.

[aidenn0]

Per TFA IPC has improved by about factor of 5, assuming a 3GHz machine runs BBC micro at equivalent performance of 15GHz

[vardump]

Reality for (SIMD) integer math is probably closer to 1000, floating point... probably 100000.

[raverbashing]

You're wrong :)

IPCs for 6502 or Z80 (4x "faster" clock but 3-6 cycles per machine cycle) processors were at the count of clock cycles per instruction

Even a measly 386/486 were much faster than that.

Enter the Pentium with the ability to execute 2 instructions in parallel.

IPC count were the big gainers recently as well

[baybal2]

It is still only 20-30 fold at max on average. So much more came from many thousand fold clock speed increase, and much wider execution paths.

[nikanj]

The perceived performance for an average desktop has been pretty stagnant since, I don't know, at least the mid-nineties.

[ajuc]

There was a huge perceived improvement when SSDs first appeared.

[spullara]

Softare expands to fill the CPU available.

[woadwarrior01]

AKA Wirth’s Law[1]: “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.”

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[FeepingCreature]

Software is being produced faster though.

[6510]

Didn't cars also follow that pattern?