occasionally I do this thing where I think about the operations that occur during a single clock edge, and then imagine what it would be like to be doing all that by hand, and how long you would have to live to have accomplished a similar quantity of work at human-level speeds.

the RAM I bought for my workstation in 2019 has collectively seen around 6.5x10^18 edges. if I took one second to complete each clock edge's work, it'd take me ten times as long as the age of the universe to match that.