I don't think it's that difficult and not even that different between industries because it's all relative to what is possible. Both 3D shooter games and quant traders always needed to be in about the same place on the technology curve in order to succeed economically.
You could compare the hardware requirements of today's best selling 3D shooter games to the hardware requirements of the original Doom. One hours worth of game play uses x CPU instructions, y kWh of energy and earns the maker of the game z dollars. You could do something similar to compare today's best quant trading desks to those of 10 or 15 years ago.
Actually you could just as well ignore CPU instructions entirely and just compute dollars earned per kWh for a few computing heavy industries. Obviously that's very crude and there are lots of missing variables but I don't think it's meaningless.
You could compare the hardware requirements of today's best selling 3D shooter games to the hardware requirements of the original Doom. One hours worth of game play uses x CPU instructions, y kWh of energy and earns the maker of the game z dollars. You could do something similar to compare today's best quant trading desks to those of 10 or 15 years ago.
Actually you could just as well ignore CPU instructions entirely and just compute dollars earned per kWh for a few computing heavy industries. Obviously that's very crude and there are lots of missing variables but I don't think it's meaningless.