Retro Console CPU Timeline

This page lets you explore the speed of retro gaming consoles. It is truly impressive how much old consoles managed to accomplish with relatively modest capabilities.

This graphs the frequency of each system’s CPU. This is roughly equivalent to how frequently each CPU was able to execute one task. Though this is a slight simplification, especially on later systems where multiple steps or “cpu cycles” are required to complete one instruction.

Like this? We also have a graph on the popularity of these various systems. You can view this other graph at our retro console timeline page.

Note: For many home consoles, the cpu speed differed depending on whether it was released for NTSC or PAL regions. We’ve chosen to graph the NTSC cpu frequencies for every console.

Also note, that we list the frequency of its main core. Several of these later systems were multicore, but this isn’t tracked in the graph. Feel free to let us know if you have ideas for visualizing this.

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