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Tom’s Hardware

Technology

Mark Tyson

Veteran dev’s newest computer is ‘200,000 times’ faster than his oldest in custom benchmarks — single-thread Dhrystone performance charted across 25 systems released between 1976 and 2023

Dave W Plummer Dave Plummer Apple Windows DEC

Plummer's DEC PDP-11/34.

Veteran Windows dev Dave W Plummer has run a simple performance test on all his computer lab systems and drawn up a fascinating comparison chart. Across his 25 computers, released between 1976 and 2023, he observed a huge 200,000X CPU performance delta. Moreover, it is admitted that the difference could have been much greater if the ancient Dhrystone benchmark performance code wasn’t resolutely single-threaded. The benchmark code also uses simple math, so the gains could be even more pronounced if it tested vectorized code.

I restore old computers, and am always curious how their classic performance compares to modern PCs. Are they a hundred times faster? A thousand? A million?Here are the stats. I wrote a Dhrystone test in K&R C that runs on everything I own, unmodified, from the PDP-11/34… pic.twitter.com/63ooTz2rkeNovember 10, 2025

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