Game consoles
PlayStation, Xbox and Switch — a quarter of a billion semi-custom AMD and NVIDIA parts, each roughly a small workstation, sold at or below cost and idle most of the day. The cheapest FLOP/s per dollar anyone has ever shipped at volume.
Game consoles over time
Installed compute in zettaFLOP/s, log scale, 2008 → present. A straight line on this axis means steady exponential growth; the slope is the doubling rate. History before the 2026 anchor is reconstructed — see the methodology.
Lifetime unit sales x exact console specs x a 63 percent active rate measured from PSN.
Sales are public and specs are exact, so this is the tightest consumer line. PS5 94.1M x 20.6 TFLOP/s, Switch 1 155.9M x 0.79, Xbox Series 35.2M x 16.0, PS4 117.2M x 2.6, Switch 2 22.6M x 6.2, Xbox One ~58M x 1.9 — 3.18e21 sold. The active rate is measured, not guessed: Sony reports 132M PSN monthly actives against 211M PS4 and PS5 sold, i.e. 63 percent.
Overlap treatment: Console APUs are distinct silicon from the PC and consumer-GPU lines.
Growth: compounding at 1.06× a year (142.7-month doubling) between published vintages.