This picture shows PC Pro contributing editor Jon Honeyball cuddling an entire fabrication wafer of Intel’s Nehalem generation of Xeons.

Pardon the overall fidelity and quality of the shot but these opportunities don’t come up often, and it was in the middle of an auditorium of journalists, waiting their chance to fondle the wafer case and go cross-eyed counting how many processors are here: we thought it might be $200,000-worth but on the other hand we couldn’t figure out which revision or clock-rate these are.

The man from Intel messed up his own presentation by bringing this lot out, because he wanted to keep a beady eye on the thing as it passed through so many hands round the hall – though if I’m honest I had no independent way to verify that this was a wafer of Nehalems; seen one naked chip, you’ve very nearly seen them all.

But it all left me wondering which year in computing history this number of Nehalems represents? That is, how many MIPS are there in that wafer, and what point would that have equalled the total number of MIPS for the entire planet. My guess is 1957, but I’m willing to be corrected…