Conversation with Gemini
How does the performance of an AMD 7950X compare with the CDC 7600
Comparing an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X to the CDC 7600 is less like a "head-to-head" and more like comparing a modern starship to a very impressive horse-drawn carriage.
The
CDC 7600, designed by the legendary Seymour Cray and released in 1969,
was the fastest computer in the world for nearly a decade.
1. Raw Computational Power
The most direct way to compare them is via FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second).
CDC 7600: At its absolute peak, it could deliver about 36 MFLOPS (36 million operations per second).
It used a 60-bit word length, which is roughly comparable to modern 64-bit precision. AMD 7950X: This CPU has a peak performance of approximately 1.3 TFLOPS in double-precision (FP64) and over 2.5 TFLOPS in single-precision (FP32).
The Verdict: The 7950X is roughly 36,000 times faster than the most powerful supercomputer of 1969. To put that in perspective, if the CDC 7600 was walking at a human pace (3 mph), the 7950X would be orbiting the Earth at 108,000 mph.
2. Architecture and Speed
The CDC 7600 was a marvel of "cordwood" construction, using discrete transistors and miles of wiring to achieve its speeds.
Clock Speed: The CDC 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz.
The 7950X boosts up to 5,700 MHz (5.7 GHz). That is a 156x increase in raw frequency alone, without even accounting for the fact that the 7950X does significantly more work per clock cycle (IPC). Parallelism: The CDC 7600 was essentially a single-core machine with some "Peripheral Processing Units" to handle I/O.
The 7950X has 16 high-performance cores and 32 threads, allowing it to solve 32 complex problems simultaneously.
3. Physical Footprint and Efficiency
This is where the comparison gets comical.
| Feature | CDC 7600 (1969) | AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (2022) |
| Size | A room-sized "C" shape (approx. 10 ft wide) | 40mm x 40mm (fits in your palm) |
| Weight | Several tons | A few grams |
| Power Draw | 95,000 Watts (plus massive cooling) | 170–230 Watts |
| Cooling | Liquid Freon refrigerant | Air or small liquid AIO |
| Transistors | ~1 million (discrete components) | 13,140 million (on-chip) |
4. Economics
CDC 7600 Cost: In 1969, it cost roughly $5 million. Adjusted for inflation in 2026, that is roughly $45 million.
AMD 7950X Cost: You can pick one up today for about $500.
For the price of one CDC 7600 in 1969, you could theoretically buy 90,000 Ryzen 7950X CPUs today. That cluster would have more processing power than every computer on Earth combined in the late 1960s.
The Reality Check
If you could somehow transport an AMD 7950X back to 1969, scientists wouldn't even have a way to "plug it in." There were no motherboards, no DDR5 RAM, and no operating systems capable of addressing 32 threads. It would be a literal "black box" from the future—a tiny sliver of silicon with more power than the entire NASA facility that put humans on the Moon.
Would you like me to compare the 7950X to a more modern supercomputer, like the Frontier or Aurora systems?
65,
Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.