The chart below is in logarithmic scale:
It charts the growth of cpu speeds in comparison with the VAX 11/780. It suggests that Moore’s law stopped applying around 2003. I decided to continue the chart using gigaflops as a metric for cpu speed and allowing for multi-core cpus.
I don’t have data on how many floating point operations the VAX 11/780 could do but I suspect it is “none” because I think the first cpu advertised as being capable of floating point operations was the Intel 8087 in 1980.
According to stack exchange it could do 50 kiloflops or .05 megaflops or .00005 gigaflops. It was in 1975 that Moore made his prediction that computers would double in speed every eighteen months, which is the same as saying it would quadruple every three years. If that had happened, these would be the numbers:
EDIT: A gentleman on twitter pointed out that I made a mistake. Moore's Law only refers to the number of transistors on a chip; it was a different person, David House, who, in 1975, observed that cpu performance had been doubling every 18 months, faster than Moore's law would suggest on its own. So it's his observation, and not Moore's law directly, that I'm checking on to see how it has held up.
- 1980: .00005 gigaflops
- 1983: 0.0002 gigaflops
- 1986: 0.0008 gigaflops
- 1989: 0.0032 gigaflops
- 1992: 0.0128 gigaflops
- 1995: 0.0512 gigaflops
- 1998: 0.2048 gigaflops
- 2001: 0.8192 gigaflops
- 2004: 3.2768 gigaflops
- 2007: 13.1072 gigaflops [note that in 2007 the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 was a high end cpu, and it could do 25 gigaflops so we were a bit ahead of House's observation]
- 2010: 52.4288 gigaflops [note that in 2010 the Intel Core i7-980X was a high end cpu, and it could do 98.4 gigaflops so we were a bit ahead of House's observation]
- 2013: 209.7152 gigaflops [note that in 2013 the Intel Core i7-4770K was a high end cpu, and it could only do 177 gigaflops so we fell behind House's observation at about this time]
- 2016: 838.8608 gigaflops
- 2019: 3,355.4432 gigaflops
- 2022: 13,421.7728 gigaflops
- 2025: 53,687.0912 gigaflops
But in 2025 we are actually at 1,696 gigaflops with the Intel Core i9-10900K. We are now significantly underperforming House's observation. It slowed down around 2013, by my numbers. It is notable that my numbers push the date that House's observation stopped applying farther down the timeline by about a decade compared with the chart I started with. I suspect that is because I allow for multi-core CPUs, which were, for a while, how computers tried to keep pace with House's observation -- by just sticking more CPUs in the machine. But since that only scales linearly, while House's observation is about exponential growth, it only bought us a little bit of time.