Quote from: gmaxwell on April 15, 2013, 04:00:22 AM

And they were, compared to current software on current hardware Sergio spent a lot of time here arguing about numbers like 7.5MH/s on a single desktop. It's _laughable_.

Time to end this debate with cold hard facts.

I just benchmarked bitcoin 0.3.24 (where the CPU mining code is identical to bitcoin 0.1.0, as both are based on crypto++), and a measly entry-level 2-core 2.5 GHz Athlon X2 4850 (released in March 2008) can reach 2.40 Mhash/s.

Therefore a 4-core 2.4 GHz Phenom X4 9750 (released in March 2008, about $200, way less than many other much more expensive desktop processors which went up to $1000) can do almost 5.0 Mhash/s (it scales linearly with the number of cores).

Finally, the overall hashrate of the network throughout 2009 was 5 Mhash/s, so it is not unreasonable that a single PC with a quad-core CPU such as the Phenom X4 9750 could have accounted for the majority of the network hashrate.