Q:

How much faster is an Intel i7 than an 8 bit 6502?

Saw a Commodore 64 recently and it got me wondering how much faster current desktop computers than the 8 bit machines we had in the 80s.
Does anyone know approximately how much faster an i7 than the 6510(6502) processor at integer calculations.

A:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second conveniently has values for both:

MOS Technology 6502: 0.500 MIPS at 1 MHz
Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 3960X (Hex core): 177,730 MIPS at 3.33 GHz

So it's about 250,000 times faster. Note that this doesn't translate into UI responsiveness, as you're also running much more software.

