How a Cray-1 Supercomputer Compares to a Raspberry Pi (roylongbottom.org.uk) 145
Roy Longbottom worked for the U.K. covernment's Central Computer Agency from 1960 to 1993, and "from 1972 to 2022 I produced and ran computer benchmarking and stress testing programs..." Known as the official design authority for the Whetstone benchmark), Longbottom writes that "In 2019 (aged 84), I was recruited as a voluntary member of Raspberry Pi pre-release Alpha testing team."
And this week — now at age 87 — Longbottom has created a web page titled "Cray 1 supercomputer performance comparisons with home computers, phones and tablets." And one statistic really captures the impact of our decades of technological progress.
"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader bobdevine for sharing the link.
And this week — now at age 87 — Longbottom has created a web page titled "Cray 1 supercomputer performance comparisons with home computers, phones and tablets." And one statistic really captures the impact of our decades of technological progress.
"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader bobdevine for sharing the link.
Which has the lowest... (Score:2)
Re:Which has the lowest... (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently the I/O design of the Cray 1 [acm.org] was less than ideal even by the standards of the day, and due to the hardware design I/O was CPU bound [unt.edu].
Re:Which has the lowest... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Which has the lowest... (Score:5, Informative)
That's a primary distinction. Supercomputers excel at performing many complex computations over a small(ish) data set. Mainframes excel at performing a few relatively simple calculations over a very large data set.
For iterative simulations, use a supercomputer. For doing enterprise payroll, use a mainframe.
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To be honest, a Pi might even beat a modern supercomputer for input latency. That is just not what they are designed for.
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I remember when I was able to access a local university's supercomputer running Ultrix, so I (with permission and for a few hours tops) started up a MUD on it. Performance was lackluster at best. Vector calculations, the machine running UNICOS did quite well, but general integer stuff, it wasn't really tuned for it.
Re:Which has the lowest... (Score:4, Interesting)
The raspberry pi. Don't underestimate just how far technology has evolved, or more importantly just how bad things were before you were born. This $4million machine did a single instruction per clock and ran only at 80MHz. The raspberry pi is 2 orders of magnitude faster per core so even if it has a less efficient pipeline it wins out easily.
I'm old enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, 'Cray' was synonymous with 'ultra fast supercomputer'. It was the go-to thing to express computing power that you, as an individual, could never hope to access never mind own.
Contrasting it with a Pi and having it lose by a large margin is somehow extremely disappointing. I have a Pi in my home that's just lying there doing nothing, a toy that I'm not currently interested in playing with.
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I'm not sure about the Cray 1, but the reason they were so fast was they were pipeline vector computers.
Where GPUs, then or now, operate math on a single number at a time, these operated on an array of numbers, like an assembly line, doing the same operation in broken up stages. Hence the time to pop a new finished calculation (like a car) was the time it took for the longest stage.
That this little whizzing new pocket computer that's nobody's definition of a number cruncher can outperform that 4.5x is quit
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Almost all supercomputers and computers, really need you to optimize your code and algorithms specially for best performance. What helped Cray was that the vector computing really helped out scientific Fortran programs without too many changes. The same programs had difficulty adapting to parallel computers. Many modern programs and programming styles don't work well on vector processors because there's so much data and it's spread out, bloatware means performance requires giant caches more than it needs fa
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Most architectures today include vector instructions. They go by various names, but almost all are SIMD - single instruction mu
Re:I'm old enough... (Score:5, Informative)
The Cray is still better in terms of seating capacity.
(Yes, I have actually sat on a Cray once.)
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Please do not sit here - https://www.clustered-pi.com/a... [clustered-pi.com]
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It is sort of ironic how things change. Even the OS has a lot more capabilities. UNICOS was good enough for a few tasks, but it pales to what is offered with Linux, QNX, and other modern UNIX/UNIX-like variants, especially with modern scripting languages.
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For me, that moment happened when Unisys created their first "mainframe on a chip." I was astounded to see a computer under somebody's desk running the same software as the multi-million-dollar mainframe, and running it faster. At that moment, I realized that computing was about to change drastically. Once businesses figured out that they didn't need to spend those millions, they certainly would not.
I was partly wrong, they still have to spend millions, now it's just on software instead of hardware.
Price per pound (Score:5, Insightful)
is more or less constant..
Re: Price per pound (Score:3, Informative)
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The Price Per Unit Weight of computers will remain constant.
(*) Recorded 31st December 2023
The Cray1 has something the RaspPi will never have (Score:4, Interesting)
It's sexy.
Back in the days, I remember drooling over pictures of that thing, reading about how they managed to squeeze every little bit of performance out of that thing (if you don't know, read up on why it has this circular shape, it's not random).
It was the future. It was exciting!
The RaspPi is impressive. But ultimately, it's the quintessential utilitarian cheap commodity hardware thing. It's as impressive and exciting as a Chinese or Indian space rocket versus the Apollo program: undeniably worthy of praise, but nothing to stay up overnight glued to your black-and-white TV set over.
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the cray made some sophisticated projects possible for the select few that could afford a time slice.
the raspberry pi made some sophisticated projects possible for almost everyone.
being cheap and utilitarian is nothing to scoff at, it's just how it rocks, and why it rocks. i'd say the pi is as sexy as can be.
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In some ways yes, in others, no.
Seeing the Cray 1 was really cool. Reading about how it managed to be so fast was fascinating. There existed a possibility you might actually see one in person or even sit on one, depending on your profession and employment or student status. You might even get to run a program on one. But that was only likely for a few. Most would never see one in person, much less touch one or run a program on one.
OTOH, I have several Raspberry PIs dedicated to doing what I an I alone want
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The 2040 does look nice. We've come a long way since the Atmega. Though I do still enjoy the way an Atmega will tolerate nearly anything, the ARM based controllers pack a lot of capability at a good price.
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It's sexy.
WTF are you talking about. There's 4 whole movies about having sex with pies, no one has ever made a movie about someone humping a Cray 1.
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I'm thinking the same thing. I picked up a no-name NUC clone which measures about three inches square, about a 1.5 inches high. It not just has a terabyte of SSD, but 32 gigs of RAM, and an 8 core Ryzen... and it isn't even pushing limits of the form factor. To boot, with HDMI and USB, it supports a lot of items.
I'm reminded of the first time I bought a SGI Indy (well used). It retailed new for over five digits, required an expensive card for 3D graphics, and some things like the camera that went on the
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If you mean day to day tasks aren't any faster, that's fairly true, as UIs have become much less efficient. But that stuff mostly gets out of the way during heavy processing, so the gains are very much what they should be when you are doing the heavy work, and you need maximum performance.
Re:The Cray1 has something the RaspPi will never h (Score:5, Insightful)
And as software bloat and inefficiencies have scaled right along with hardware horsepower, the net gain is nowhere near what it should be.
Software inefficiencies have scaled far beyond hardware gains. My current laptop (with 8 GB RAM) boots more slowly than the one I wrote my PhD dissertation on in 2000 (with 64 MB, yes MB, of RAM). But TeX -- which to first approximation, is the same code now as back then -- screams compared to 20+ years ago.
To all of the software engineers that have come of age in the last 20 years, go back to understand how your predecessors were able to squeeze performance out of simple code and comparatively impoverished hardware and ask yourself where the industry has gone wrong.
Re:The Cray1 has something the RaspPi will never h (Score:4, Insightful)
Every programmer should know how to write fast code, but it doesn't mean they should do it all the time. Writing slow code is often the right thing to do. Programmer efficiency is important too.
Here's an example. People complain about Python being slow, but when it was introduced 30 years ago, the interpreter was no more efficient than the modern one. Probably less efficient. And computers were 100 or 1000x slower, but people still loved Python because it made them more efficient.
Go back even further to the earliest home PCs from companies like Apple, Commodore, and Atari. They all came with a BASIC interpreter built in. That was how most people programmed them. A 1 MHz 8 bit processor, and people made it even slower by programming in an interpreted language. That seems crazy. But it was easy, and it was still fast enough for a lot of things. That made it the right choice.
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Agreed. But it's worth noting that the savings of software developer time by not writing efficient code can be a fraction of the additional time spent by end users due to the resulting inefficiency. The more widely deployed and frequently used the software is, the higher the resulting total cost across the user base even though the cost to the typical individual user may be quite modest.
One product I use daily is Quicken (now "Quicken Classic") on Windows which is an example of this. It is, admittedly, an e
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That performance isn't a new thing. Around 1998 I had to input a bunch of data into a Quicken on DOS system. I could literally type in the data faster than the program could accept it, so much so that if I didn't pause every minute or two I would overrun the buffer and lose data.
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At least it appears Quicken's owners have been consistently optimizing for poor performance over the years. I suppose they should get some credit for being consistent.
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Every programmer should know how to write fast code, but it doesn't mean they should do it all the time. Writing slow code is often the right thing to do. Programmer efficiency is important too.
When it's boot code, that will be run by many millions of machines likely many millions of times per year, programming time is nearly irrelevant, and efficiency is paramount.
There's no reason, as an example, for it to take more than a few milliseconds to register with the local AP and secure an IP address over DHCP. And yet for many laptops, tablets, and cell phones, it takes seconds. Why? Because programmer time is more important? Please.
People complain about Python being slow, but when it was introduced 30 years ago, the interpreter was no more efficient than the modern one. Probably less efficient. And computers were 100 or 1000x slower, but people still loved Python because it made them more efficient.
Python is a poor example for your case. I'd strongly recommend re
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This is something that Steve Jobs recognized when he screamed and cajoled and implored the first Macintosh development team to speed up the boot-up process of the first 128k Mac. It took 30 seconds to boot off a floppy disk and it was too slow for him. He took the number of extra seconds wasted by the boot process, multiplied it by th
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Absolutely, there are cases when speed really matters and code needs to be well optimized. I'm just saying it's not universal, the 1980s weren't some golden age of efficient programming. Some code was really fast. Some was slow because it didn't need to be fast. And some was slow and really should have been faster. The same as today.
Python is a poor example for your case.
Why?
Re:The Cray1 has something the RaspPi will never h (Score:4, Interesting)
It really isn't up to the programmer. It is up to the Scrum master and PM. I have worked at places where if developers are not doing 10,000 lines of code a day, which was a metric, they would lose their jobs, because they can be replaced by a contractor who can write that many lines.
Companies which value code quality are rare. In my experience, many just care to get a feature out, and view technical debt as an illusion, where when it collapses, they just kick the devs to deal with the mess. Especially places which have been in sprints for 4+ years, because the Scrum master/PM says, "not being in a sprint is like having the race car not in drive."
If you want code quality, it will be startups, F/OSS organizations... or (ironically) malware organizations which value their stuff working than LoC as a core metric.
Re: The Cray1 has something the RaspPi will never (Score:3)
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It really isn't up to the programmer. It is up to the Scrum master and PM.
If your scrum master has something to say about performance of the code you wrote, you're doing scrum wrong. Don't feel bad though, most people do scrum wrong.
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A modern machine can boot with cryptographic checks on the OS, and an overall secure architecture with layers of protection that weren't even dreamt of back in 2000, in a few seconds.
That's not a regression.
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Yup. For example, Microsoft Word feels slower than it's been in a couple of decades, despite the continual increase in computer speed. Word 95, once loaded, felt so much faster than the Word I use at work today.
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And you probably don't use many, if any, features that weren't available in Word I (except WYSIWIG). Probably 95% of users used 5% of the features in Word 4.3, when I was installing it, and I doubt if the ratio has gotten any better.
It would be nice if people used it intelligently. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Airlines are crammed like slave ships,
that's because companies are cheap and users dumb enough to let them get away with it. actually, often users are part of the problem. none of it has nothing to do with cpu power or software efficiency.
and classic books are being edited and censored by revenue algorithms,
that's because ... wait for it: companies are cheap and users dumb enough to let them get away with it. actually, often users are part of the problem. none of it has nothing to do with cpu power or software efficiency.
but my phone oh-so-helpfully reminds me to buy laundry detergent.
well, it can do way more than your shopping list, and development kits abound. what's holding
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Expecting billions of people to spontaneously self-organize into a universally self-aware, highly imaginative consumer union that efficiently pressures industry to meet its potential is clearly reasonable, while expecting genius-level professionals and tech entrepreneurs who were practically born into exec
Is there an alternative? (Score:2)
Whatever else the development of the IT industry etc has reminded us of, it has reminded us that the market will find and sell alternatives if they exist. If there was an easy solution to the slave class experience, someone would have found it and introduced it because the slaves would have been attracted to such a solution. That they haven't strongly suggests that there isn't a solution.
The fact that there is the option of paying more for a more civilised experience also suggests that the slaves prefer che
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Hence, the slave ship experience when the actual s
Interesting (Score:2)
News to me. Want to tell me more - got a link?
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Lol, I worked on the Sonic Cruiser project in the 90's. I still have a few pre-production samples of some of the (proposed) hardware. They used to have a big mockup of it in the lobby of one of the buildings down in Renton.
It was a dead dog on the runway from the start because it was a solution for a problem that didn't exist.
No viable 'audience' or customer base existed that would pay an extra couple of thousand dollars to get to Europe an hour earlier.
I didn't care; Boeing paid me handsomely to do whateve
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Not convinced (Score:2)
Blended wing doesn't seem to offer any particular improvement for cattle class, whilst supersonic planes seem irrelevant to the debate unless their tickets get to cost about the same as our current prices. Or am I missing something?
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Consumer-blaming is one of the lazier forms of victim-blaming.
so who is to blame for you underutilizing the (vastly superior than a 70s supercomputer) computing potential of your phone again?
and don't get me wrong, big companies are shit, in great part because capitalism is shit. but this has nothing to do with computing power.
re the current state of the art of software design and writing in particular (and that is a complex and multifaceted reality, but lets just grossly simplify) ... you would have a very good point there. sw nowadays is hugely anti-economical by de
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Clearly it's the fault of the general public, who can barely do high school algebra, for not getting advanced IT degrees that might let them fully utilize technology. And it's my fault for broadly studying sciences rather than asking two-digit-IQ'd hereditary corporate overlords which narrow engineering field they want their drones focusing on this week.
I'm saying IT stra
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Thought I stumbled on a classic Andy Rooney 60 Minutes rant there. https://content.time.com/time/... [time.com]
Anyhow back to classic supercomputers.
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Slide rules and room computers: Moon landings and supersonic jets everywhere. Supercomputer phones: Ad bombardment and fuckall else?
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Airlines are crammed like slave ships
Don't know what you're talking about. The last flight I took I had several cubic meters to myself and a complete lay flat bed on the plane and the ticket was cheaper than an shitty economy class seat from the 90s. Bonus points that I got to chose when I wanted my meal had a huge choice of food and alcohol, a dedicated lounge with restaurant serving free food, showers, and a quite room to sleep in.
Airlines are offering you what you want. You just don't want to pay for it. You are making your own future shit,
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Those books were always censored.
For example, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory originally had the umpa-lumpas as an African tribe... That Wonka transported... The publisher made him charge them before the first edition could be printed.
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Re: It would be nice if people used it intelligen (Score:2)
You weren't?
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It's one cut in the death of a thousand cuts to our ability to better understand attitudes of the past through it's fiction. Wonka having slaves wasn't that important to the story. The fact that him having slaves could be part of the story background without raising too many eyebrows speaks volumes.
If you want to get a perspective on attitudes and beliefs of the early 20th century, watch old cartoons and the Three Stooges. Watch with some depth and you'll gain actual insights. Especially if you can do so wi
Re: It would be nice if people used it intelligen (Score:2)
A world that will never return (Score:5, Interesting)
There is more to it than the relative benchmarks
When I was a kid in the 70s I had various jobs programing the CDC 6000/7000 computers at LBL in Berkeley. Hundreds if not thousands of researchers used those computers which ran thousands of jobs every day, submitted on punch card decks either locally or from remote locations.
Those computers had not only their own behemoth power supplies, but their own support staff to keep them running. Trained operators would fetch 1/2 inch tapes from the library and mount them on those refrigerator-sized tape drives. Dedicated staff wrote and updated the operating systems and even compilers. And there were at least two full-time engineers that had an office where they repaired things that broke.
They even had accounting staff. All this was paid for by intra-agency billing, where each job charged for each millisecond of processor time and each "kilo-core-second" used. And a purchasing department to order and stock the endless boxes of line-printer and teletype paper, punched tape, hollerith cards, magnetic tape, and so on.
It didn't stop there. All of this was housed in a special room behind locked doors with special architecture to route all those 30-70 pound cables under the floor. You had to have special privilege to go in there without escort. So its own police force, effectively. Over the hill and Livermore Labs where they did a lot of top secret work (still do) there was a police force in actuality.
To the general public, the main staff that casually wafted in and out of that room looked more like a priesthood than anything to do with engineering.
Aside from computing power, there is no way to compare all that to the typical 5W palm-top disposable rig. A lot of what I describe still exists around large operations (where I rent space in a co-hosting location is like that) but it is more that the culture around them is all different.
Computers are not future-safe (Score:2)
Anything you buy today will be obsolete tomorrow. We know that.
Any computer from today will be surpassed in speed and efficiency by something that comes out a year from now. The thing is, though, if you need that computation power now, you can't just wait another year.
Is a computer of today faster than from from 45 years ago? Umm.... duh! Factor 4.5? Yeah, why not. Hardly a surprise. But you had that 45 years ago and I only got it today.
Depending on what's your plan, 45 years may be a really, really long ti
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The performance improvement on the ground has perceptibly slowed down of late. It used to be that every generation gave a massive leap ahead in performance, now we are seeing much smaller percentage improvements as we encounter various practical limitations.
Factor 4.5? Yeah, why not. Hardly a surprise. But you had that 45 years ago and I only got it today.
Hmm, now I wonder how much faster a modern machine/cluster would be if you spent the $10M a Cray 1 system could cost... even if you don't adjust for inflation. I think the impressive (if still not surprising) part is that a cute little toy computer of to
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The performance improvement on the ground has perceptibly slowed down of late.
Indeed. Between 2004 and 2010 the raw performance of a desktop CPU increased by a factor of 10 [cpubenchmark.net]. But the last factor of 10 increase took 14 years.
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A few years ago someone built the 136th most powerful computer in the world by leasing $5000 of services from AWS. So spend 200 times that and . . . yikes!
Re:Computers are not future-safe (Score:5, Informative)
Anything you buy today will be obsolete tomorrow. We know that.
Not as much as it used to be. I'm writing this from a nearly 14 year old laptop (thinkpad W510) with a late life upgrade of 32G of RAM and 1TB flash drive. It's not a speed demon, but it still kicks the crap out of a surprising number of laptops in terms of RAM and storage (it'll hold 16TB easily, probably more). Haha crappy new macbook airs max out at 24G RAM lolz.
But 14 years ago (2010), 14 years prior was 1996. Top of the line PC desktop was a pentium pro 200MHz, and supported... wait what 64G RAM? WTF? That's some exotic shit there, and apparently the super high end 4 socket server motherboards could hold 4 with late generation SIMMs, though most even high end desktops wouldn't go anywhere near that (16 sockets!!). Anyhow much more expensive at that point than even this laptop.
Either way, a 1996 computer in 2010 was unusable: far too slow, and low on RAM.
So not obsolete tomorrow, maybe next week.
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I'm sitting here on a desktop running an i7 from 2014 (IIRC). Looking at 22" screens that are close to 20 years old now. They still do their job pretty well and yes, back then they all were insanely expensive.
The thing is, and here the comparison between Cray and RasPi falls flat, upgrading to a modern system with similar specs will not allow me to save on power.
We have reached "good enough" a long time ago with PCs. I would say no later than 2010. 2015 if you're into gaming (and don't hunt the elusive 8k o
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So not obsolete tomorrow, maybe next week.
Funny coming from someone who did a late life upgrade.
But 14 years ago (2010), 14 years prior was 1996. Top of the line PC desktop was a pentium pro 200MHz, and supported... wait what 64G RAM? WTF? That's some exotic shit there
You're mixing desktop and workstations/servers. Pentium Pros were not for typical desktops. If you focus on the high end of CPU offerings you'll find they always supported quite incredible RAM. Current Ryzen 7000 Threadrippers support 1TB. Intel Xeon E5v3 supported 768GB 10 years ago.
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The air definitely supports more than 2.4G of RAM.
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Anything you buy today will be obsolete tomorrow. We know that.
Here is the difference, something that cost millions of USD decades ago you can get better performance for something now for ~70USD. I have not seen one of these for a while, here we go:
In 1974, you could buy a low-mid range US made auto for about 3700 USD. That equates to about 23,000 USD now. But a similar new auto costs around 30,000 USD (maybe a lot more). Performance wise, not much of a difference. So yes, computers have improved greatly over the years. But in Autos, there were no real improvemen
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Cars in '74 sucked performance wise, you should have gone with 1969, but even then you would have been wrong; Car are coming of the dealer's lot with 500 and 600 horsepower and street legal cars have ran the quarter in 5.77 sec at 260 mph.
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Uh... yes we are. If I was to get into an accident, please put me in a contemporary car instead of a 1974 death trap. There's a reason modern cars are far heavier than their pre-1990 counterparts. Most of it has to do with safety.
Also, a lot of handling improvements have happened since, also with considerable effect on safety. Hydraulic steering, anti-blocking brakes, traction control, ... these things were either completely unavailable in the 1970s or a hard to get feature in some of the top of the line lu
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Is a computer of today faster than from from 45 years ago? Umm.... duh! Factor 4.5? Yeah, why not. Hardly a surprise. But you had that 45 years ago and I only got it today.
That 4.5 quote is about a tiny computer from 10 years ago (and it even says so i the submission). So you got far more than that after 35 years, smarty pants. Or to quote from TFA: "The first PC to reach the average Cray 1 Livermore Loops score is indicated as a 1994 100 MHz Pentium."
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True. No computer that I have bought in the last 20 years ever became obsolete, it just eventually stopped working reliably after several years. Unless it was a smart phone. Those get obsoleted by OS changes after several years - my iPhone 6S had to be replaced this year only because changes to the OS, and thus the apps, prevented it from working properly (it would get hot and drain the power from a full charge to zero in three hours).
What will people think of the Raspberry Pi... (Score:2)
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Pretty sure that means a drastic change in architecture, moreso than everything on punch cards and paper tape (1950's) to everything stored on the disk. If nothing else, the speed of light pretty much guarantees that. You need to switch to essentially parallel to get that kind of speedup, and some things are resistant to parallelization to that degree.
Note that the GPUs depend on the stuff they handle being processed the same way when it's split into lots of pieces. But not all problems are amenable to
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My father-in-law was a teacher in the highlands of Peru for 32 years. The Inca never had last names so they were assigned them by the Spanish barbarians when they were baptized, and the Spaniards who went to Peru were **NOT** nice guys. A few of the last names the he encountered included:
Cusihaullpa - Happy Chicken
Huallpasuya - Chicken thief
Sucasaca - Slang at the time for 'cuckold'
Sacacaca - Take out the shit
And the all-time worst:
Alcoruntu - Dog balls
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my grandmother's oncologist (?) for terminal cancer was the unfortunately named "Dr. Posthumous" . . .
hawk
But can the Cray-1 ... (Score:2)
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Well you'd have to design a framebuffer first. But I suspect it could do something over a terminal.
Wow !: RasPi 4.5 times faster than Cray 1 (Score:2)
“The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.”
Neither has an Audio Jack (Score:2)
Cray-1 for sale (Score:2)
From Byte Magazine, April 1981, Unclassified Ads, Page 414:
https://archive.org/details/BY... [archive.org]
MUST SELL: One slighty used Cray-1 -- too big for my apartment. Hardware included: light-dimmer interface, toaster interface, one home-brew 64-bit parallel I/O port with Nixie-tub indicators, coat hangers, extra buffing powder for instruction buffers, one box of bootstraps. Software included: CAL assembler on thirteen cassette tapes in Kansas City format, Morse-code trainer, tic-tac-toe game, 8080 emulator. Price
On the other hand, the Cray 1 had an 80 MHz clock. (Score:3)
According to the tables on TFA, the clock speed of the Cray 1 was 80 MHz and the Raspberry Pi 700 - 1,800 MHz, so, unless the benchmarks account for clock speed differences, if the Cray 1 was (could be) overclocked to match, it looks like it would be faster and that goes of several (many?) of the other systems listed.
Slashdot ran out of time (Score:2)
I have one question to ask you (Score:2)
Re: Is the comparison even valid ? (Score:2)
And a Pi doesn't have a GPU that would knock the socks of the vector unit in the XMP. Though the Cray1 didn't have a vector unit so meh