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Visualizing the Trillion-Fold Increase in Computing Power

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On July 20, 1969, millions of people received an inspirational jolt from watching two brave astronauts take humankind’s first steps on the moon. Rightly so, those astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, are now household names to many – however, their Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) remains the unsung hero that made their moon landing possible in the first place.

With processing power equivalent to a pair of Nintendo consoles, the AGC wasn’t flashy. But despite its technical limitations, the AGC functioned admirably as the interface for guidance, navigation, and control of the spacecraft to get humans to their first lunar destination.

To Infinity and Beyond?

If a pair of Nintendo consoles can get us to the moon, there’s no telling what the future may hold as computing power continues to grow.

Today’s infographic comes to us from Experts Exchange, and it visualizes the 1 trillion-fold increase in computing performance from 1956 to 2015.

Visualizing the Trillion-Fold Increase in Computing Power

The Incredible Shrinking Hard Disk

In the 1970s, data storage equipment was serious business. The IBM 305 RAMAC, for example, weighed a ton and measured 16 square feet. The RAMAC’s storage capacity? Just 5MB.

Thankfully, hard disks are no longer the size of filing cabinets. The animation below visualizes just how compact terabytes of storage have become.

Hard Drive Disc Comparison

Computing in the Real World

A relatable touchpoint for many people will be ever-changing graphics quality of video games.

The journey from Atari’s pixelated stick figures to today’s crisp, hyper-realistic graphics is a surprisingly good visual aid to help us understand increases in computing power over many years.

NHL EA Sports Graphics

The journey from Pong to Call of Duty is inexorably linked to processing power. As the comprehensive list below demonstrates, modern gaming systems are so powerful that even the revolutionary Xbox 360 now looks quaint in comparison.

YEARMFLOPSCONSOLE
19760Fairchild Channel F (Pong)
19770Atari 2600
19830NES
19860Atari 7800
19880Sega Genesis
19900SNES
19910Sega CD
19940Sony PlayStation
19940Sega Saturn
1996200Nintendo 64
20006,200Sony PlayStation 2
2005240,000Xbox 360
2006459,200Sony PlayStation 3
20131,228,800Xbox One
20131,843,200Sony PlayStation 4

Our ExaFLOP Future

Though performance drivers are flattening out, supercomputing continues to hit new milestones. The next one on the list is exascale computing – and at that level, machines will be capable of a million-trillion calculations a second.

Why do we even need computers that powerful? For one, some of the biggest challenges facing humankind are extremely complicated, and we just don’t have the computing power to tackle them as effectively as we could. Two relevant examples are climate modeling and life sciences.

All these advances are pushing us closer to a major symbolic milestone: computers as powerful and complex as the human brain.

Computer Brain Exascale

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

We visualized the results of an analysis by the World Economic Forum, which uncovered the jobs most impacted by AI.

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools haven’t been around for very long, but they’re expected to have far-reaching impacts on the way people do their jobs. With this in mind, researchers have already begun studying the potential impacts of this transformative technology.

In this graphic, we’ve visualized the results of a World Economic Forum report, which estimated how different job departments will be exposed to AI disruption.

Data and Methodology

To identify the job departments most impacted by AI, researchers assessed over 19,000 occupational tasks (e.g. reading documents) to determine if they relied on language. If a task was deemed language-based, it was then determined how much human involvement was needed to complete that task.

With this analysis, researchers were then able to estimate how AI would impact different occupational groups.

DepartmentLarge impact (%)Small impact (%)No impact (%)
IT73261
Finance70219
Customer Sales671617
Operations651817
HR57412
Marketing56413
Legal46504
Supply Chain431839

In our graphic, large impact refers to tasks that will be fully automated or significantly altered by AI technologies. Small impact refers to tasks that have a lesser potential for disruption.

Where AI will make the biggest impact

Jobs in information technology (IT) and finance have the highest share of tasks expected to be largely impacted by AI.

Within IT, tasks that are expected to be automated include software quality assurance and customer support. On the finance side, researchers believe that AI could be significantly useful for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing.

Still interested in AI? Check out this graphic which ranked the most commonly used AI tools in 2023.

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