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Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

If "million times slowdown" is accurate, then by eyeballing that should take us roughly from the state of the art consumer processors of today back to the realm of the m68k. Sure, that's a giant gap. But I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that there could be useful tasks done under those circumstances.

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To me m68k seems something like 10 000 times slower than modern hardware, not a million times. From the demo descriptions I get an impression (though there are no benchmarks to be sure) that it's much more limited than what could be done on a m68k.

More accurate: an early 6502 or Z80 (circa late 70s/early 80s) with speeds in the low MHz range.

So a ~40-year regression in performance.

And a from-0-to-100 gain in privacy.

Calling this a "regression" is nonsense.

for non-English speakers: colloquially, performance == speed. this is a regression in speed, I was making GP’s assessment more accurate.

m68k is the equivalent of those, it's late 70s/early80s, with speeds in the low MHz range (e.g. 7.67 MHz for the version in Sega Genesis) - but I haven't seen claims of FHE having that high of a performance (e.g. sum or filter a million numbers in a second as low MHz allows you to do) but only something an order of magnitude or two slower (e.g. 13ms/core for a bit operation might be treated as comparable to a 0.077 MHz microcomputer; you can parallelize over cores but that computer parallelized over bits), so we're talking about much more than a 40-year regression of performance, as it's slower than the first 1970s microcomputers which themselves were slower than the 1960s minicomputers, so perhaps the 1950s early transistor computers?

You’re right. The original 68k chip was contemporaneous with the Z80 and 6502.

I was thinking of the later chips in the 68k series, which got much faster over the years.

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