My laptop has the Intel dual core processors, each running at 2.0GHz.  Even a single processor at 2 gigs is something I've not quite come to terms with.  Recently I had an app where I generated items by running a counter from zero to MAX_INT. 

Not so long ago I only did this by accident, and the symptom would be that my computer went catatonic for as long as I cared to wait.

On my laptop, a simple count, implemented in C#, takes a few tens of seconds -- well under a minute.  Which I guess makes sense -- 4 gig of integers to count, a handful of cycles per count, divided by 2 gig, and there you are.

It's usually better to be a little clever, but brute force is certainly more of an option than before.