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Cray versus Raspberry Pi

aardvark.co.nz

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Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#121

Post by zelos »

inkyoto wrote: post #117
anthk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Porsche Taycan has two forward gears, but it's apparently the only EV that does: https://www.wired.com/story/electric-car-two-speed-transmiss...

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#122

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

mrheosuper wrote: post #120
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

dammit typo. that was supposed to be 16kb

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#124

Post by BizarroLand »

dizhn wrote: post #32
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.

Kitt was funny though. (For its time)

For the time yes, but if I bought a car tomorrow and it had Kitt's sass I would cut his speakers in a week.

I don't need my car to constantly whine, needle, harass, demean, and insult me.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#125

Post by Animats »

Animats wrote: post #73

Back in 2020, someone built a working model of a Cray-1.[1] Not only is it instruction compatible, using an FPGA, it's built into a 1/10 scale case that looks like a Cray-1. The Cray-1 is really a very simple machine, with a small instruction set. It just has 64 of everything. It was built from discrete components, almost the last CPU built that way. [1] https://www.cpushack.com/2010/09/15/homebrew-cray-1a-1976-vs...

(2010, actually.)

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#126

Post by dardeaup »

giantrobot wrote: post #55
kayodelycaon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a little poking round and I think the modern equivalent to old super computers is a mainframe. Modern super computers take up entire warehouses, cost upwards of $100 million, and are measured in exaflops. Cray 1 costs US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $41 million in 2024) (Source: Wikipedia) I have no idea what IBM z-series mainframes cost but I think it would be less. $41 million can buy you one or more th…

Mainframes aren't supercomputers. The point of a mainframe (anymore) is reliable transactions without downtime. They're not necessarily beasts at computation. Supercomputers were and are beasts of not only computation but memory size and bandwidth. They're used for tasks where the computation is highly parallel but the memory is not. If you're doing nuclear physics or fluid dynamics every particle in a simulation has…

Agreed! If you look at the branding from IBM for their various hardware lines, it's clear that they agree with you:

    zSeries: z = "zero" downtime
    iSeries: i = "integration" (DB2 baked into OS)
    pSeries: p = "performance"

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#127

Post by daotoad »

This little piece reminds me of a conversation I had about the power of modern mobile phones.

Given a modern flagship phone, what year was that phone equivalent to total world computational power?

For example, based on TFA, a Pi5 represents a around a thousand Cray 1 systems in 1977. Based on that seems likely that a single Pi5 outstrips total world supercomputer capacity in 1977.

We tossed some numbers around, but the rough consensus was that the were likely to have the 60s covered and most of the 70s as well. Given that this was a decade ago, I expect that we could move forward a few years.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#128

Post by msgodel »

hattmall wrote: post #64
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…

Nice, but the ~40 year latency is kind 0f high.

Well that's the way parallelism goes.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#129

Post by [deleted] »

BizarroLand wrote: post #124
dizhn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kitt was funny though. (For its time)

For the time yes, but if I bought a car tomorrow and it had Kitt's sass I would cut his speakers in a week. I don't need my car to constantly whine, needle, harass, demean, and insult me.

[deleted]

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#130

Post by pjmlp »

prmoustache wrote: post #106
anthk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you can get a driver license with an automatic. But it just means you can only drive automatics. It would have been a huge deal not being able to drive manuals 20y ago but hybrid and ev all being automatic it is not that much of a downside nowadays unless you want to buy old cars or borrow friend's car. Most renting fleets have autos available nowadays.

Our family owns a Ford Focus hybrid in Europe, I can tell you they are not all automatic.
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