The Power of the Dollar

Just how much compute does one dollar get you?

Compute

Compute can be measured in operations per second.

An “operation” typically describes a logical or arithmetic operation. These happen on “ALU”s (Arithmetic Logic Units) in computers, commonly referred to as “cores”1. These are things like “logical OR these two values”, or “add these two numbers”.

A note, floating point operations a bit different. Logical and arithmetic operations are much simpler than more intensive FLOPs. A machine that might be optimized for ALU But the price economics

Costs

Thanks to good ol’ Moore’s Law, the cost of compute operations have been exponentially decreasing.

Practically, chips stay roughly the same cost, but the amount of operations a single chip can run keeps increasing.

Compute Costs

Let’s look at the evolution of the cost o

Asides:

Footnotes

  1. Without getting into the weeds, a core might contain more than a single ALU. But a core has at least one ALU. ↩