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Cray versus Raspberry Pi

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Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#111

Post by fentonc »

rahen wrote: post #47
delichon wrote: post #3

> but then again if you'd showed me an RPi5 back in 1977 I would have said "nah, impossible" so who knows? I was reading lots of scifi in 1977, so I may have tried to talk to the pi like Scotty trying to talk to the mouse in Star Trek IV. And since you can run an LLM and text to speech on an RPi5, it might have answered.

No need for an RPi 5. Back in 1982, a dual or quad-CPU X-MP could have run a small LLM, say, with 200–300K weights, without trouble. The Crays were, ironically, very well suited for neural networks, we just didn’t know it yet. Such an LLM could have handled grammar and code autocompletion, basic linting, or documentation queries and summarization. By the late 80s, a Y-MP might even have been enough to support a small…

I think a quad-CPU X-MP is probably the first computer that could have run (not train!) a reasonably impressive LLM if you could magically transport one back in time. It supported a 4GB (512 MWord) SRAM-based "Solid State Drive" with a supported transfer bandwidth of 2 GB/s, and about 800 MFLOPS CPU performance on something like a big matmul. You could probably run a 7B parameter model with 4-bit quantization on it with careful programming, and get a token every couple seconds.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#112

Post by hagbard_c »

usrnm wrote: post #78
dale_huevo wrote: post #77

> the Cray had about 160MFLOPS of raw processing power; the Pi has... up to 30GFLOPS. Yes... that's giga FLOPS. This makes it almost 200 times faster than the Cray. Imagine traveling back to 1977 and explaining to someone that in 2025 we've allocated all that extra computing power to processing javascript bundles and other assorted webshit.

That actually wouldn't be so bad, but in reality the number one usecase for raspberry pi is blinking leds for some time and collecting dust afterwards

No, the number one use case for Pies is being built into commercial hardware in the form of compute boards.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#113

Post by DrillShopper »

dmd wrote: post #40
DrillShopper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really? What vehicle can I buy today, drive home, get twice the legal limit drunk, flop in the back alone to take a nap while my car drives me two hours away to a relative's house? I'd really like to buy that car so I await your response.

The only thing stopping a Waymo from doing that is laws.

I can't buy a Waymo

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#114

Post by phendrenad2 »

dahart wrote: post #49

My former boss (Steve Parker, RIP) shared a story of Turner Whitted making predictions about how much compute would be needed to achieve real-time ray tracing, some time around when his seminal paper was published (~1980). As the story goes, Turner went through some calculations and came to the conclusion that it’d take 1 Cray per pixel. Because of the space each Cray takes, they’d be too far apart and he thought the…

Whitted mentioned! Cofounder of the first 3d game engine company.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#115

Post by dahart »

nereye wrote: post #70
bsoles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commodore 64 had text to speech in late 80s. Also, my friend's father in the 80s was the driver of a French Consulate's member in Turkey. His car (a Renault) had speech functionality.

Early 80s (1982), according to Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth

That brings back some memories. My friend and I messed around with S.A.M. on his Atari 800 a lot when we were kids. We would crank call the parents of other kids we knew and have SAM tell them their kids had skipped school and might get suspended. It was funny to some twelve year olds anyway.

SAM had a basic mode where you just type English, but it also had an advanced phonetic input mode where you could control the sound and stress on every syllable. My favorite thing to do was try to give SAM a British accent.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#116

Post by DrillShopper »

ptero wrote: post #35
DrillShopper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really? What vehicle can I buy today, drive home, get twice the legal limit drunk, flop in the back alone to take a nap while my car drives me two hours away to a relative's house? I'd really like to buy that car so I await your response.

That's a jurisdiction problem, not a technology problem. No tech is foolproof, but even with the current technology someone would be much safer (for others, too) in the back seat than trying to drive tired, borderline DUI at night in unfamiliar town. Which many folks regularly do, for example on business travel. The reason I cannot do this today is laws, not technology. My 2c.

The claim is that self driving is mundane - something everyone can have if they want. A standard feature, so entwined in the background of life that it is unremarkable.

Given that there is no system out there that I can own, jump in the back of in no condition to drive, and get to my destination safely defeats that claim. It's not even so mundane that everyone has the anemic Tesla self-driving feature that runs over kids and slams into highway barriers.

It may also be a matter of laws, but the underlying tech is also still not there given all the warnings any current "self driving car" systems give about having to pay attention to the road and keep your hands on the wheel even if the laws weren't there.

Could I get behind the wheel of my self driving car, drunk, and make it there safely? No, I definitely couldn't, and I understand why those laws exist with all of the existing failure modes of self driving cars.

People have called the current state of LLMs "sparkling AutoComplete". The current state of "self-driving cars" is "sparkling lane assist" with a chaser of adaptive cruise control.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#117

Post by inkyoto »

anthk wrote: post #104
KineticLensman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like James Bond's Aston Martin with a satnav/tracking device in 1964's Goldfinger. Kids would know what that was but they might not understand why Bond had to continually shift some sort of stick to change the car's gear.

Gear shifting it's still a thing in Europe, and mandatory if you want to get your driver's license.

At this point, it is a historical artefact that will cease to exist soon enough.

Electric vehicles do not have gearboxes as there are no converters, so there is nothing to shift up or down. A few performance EV's that have been announced (and maybe even have released) with a gear stick, do so for nostalgic reasons and the gear shift + the accompanying experience is simulated entirely in the software.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#118

Post by pjmlp »

And then people burn all this progress shipping browsers with their application, because they can't be bothered to learn neither Web standards, nor native tooling.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#119

Post by mrheosuper »

dgacmu wrote: post #44

Comparing against a raspberry pi 5 is kind of overkill. While a Pico 2 is close to computationally equivalent to a cray 1 now (version 2 added hardware floating point), the cray still has substantially more memory - almost 9MB vs 520k. For parity, you have to move up to a raspberry pi zero 2, which costs $15 and uses about 2W of powerm A million times cheaper than a cray in 2025 dollars and quite a bit more capable.

you can add psram to rp2350, which brings it close to cray

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#120

Post by mrheosuper »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #108
noobermin wrote: post #86

I guess I'm old because this hasn't really been that insightful of interesting observation just by itself anymore. People often talk about technological advancement of computing as if it is a force of nature whereas the amazing specs of say a rp2350 compared to the cray-1 is more of a story of the economies of scale as opposed to merely technical know-how and design. The reason a rp2350 is a few dollars is because of…

I think the really interesting post here is that a reasonably high level of computer is basically free. you can get a 32 but microcontroller with 16mb of ram at above 100mhz for well under $1. you can buy a USB cable and it has 2 full computers inside it.

where do i find a MCU with 16MB ram for under $1 ?
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