> In ~1997 this level of compute power would have been enough to get on the TOPS500 list of the fastest computers our civilization is capable of creating.... now something that consumes only 54 sq mm of silicon that gets put into a $15.00 gadget.<p>... and it's incapable of doing anything useful without even bigger computers somewhere else.<p>Progress is so odd sometimes.
> The engineering that went into this block was probably in the thousands of person-hours and involved some pretty rare engineering skills.<p>It’s probably in the tens of thousands - one person working on it by themselves for a year gets you to 2000 hours.
Related from 5 days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25742276" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25742276</a>
It’s super impressive that someone can just look at a die image and know what blocks are what. Kinda wished I knew more to about ASICs to be able to do the same.