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Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#22Um, I doubt this, very very much. The Air has a 50 W/h battery. That's 50W for a full hour. So if they are saying that it would last 2.5 seconds, that means the putative 1990s computer would have to consume 60 x 24 x 50 = 72,000 Watts! Someone at the Atlantic needs to figure out basic math.
Did you read the article? "Imagine you've got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago."
It would take an awful lot of 1990's machines to equal the computing power of a macbook air.
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#23Um, I doubt this, very very much. The Air has a 50 W/h battery. That's 50W for a full hour. So if they are saying that it would last 2.5 seconds, that means the putative 1990s computer would have to consume 60 x 24 x 50 = 72,000 Watts! Someone at the Atlantic needs to figure out basic math.
I think that's the reason for the distinction between "a 1990 computer" and a "computer with 1990 energy efficiency." It's explained quite clearly in the article itself.
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it to mean they were factoring in the computing power as well. i.e. they estimated that it would take 72,000 Watts-worth of 1990s computers to match the processing power of a Macbook Air. Though that does add further caveats to an already less-than-ideal comparison (as an MBA is not going to last seven hours at 100% CPU load).
Sounds like they ought to mention how long that is in football fields.
If you placed all the iPhones in the world end to end on a line, some of them would be in the ocean.
There, I wrote about iPhones. Now give me my ad revenue.
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#25[deleted]
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a fair comparison. A 90s mainframe would probably smoke an Air if they were competing on IOPS with a thousand connected users!
It's easy to forget that 1Gbit/second an insane amount of text / numberic data and 1990 was a LONG time ago. Just concider that the extimated monthly transfter acroos internet backbones in December 1990 was 1TB. That 1GBit lan cable was 100's of times faster than all of the internet backbones in 1990. So while, Mainframe software is vary efficent the hardware still sucked compared to modern systems. Just think a 1GBi…
An interesting aspect is how much more slowely memory sizes have caught up. Today's laptops can crush a 90s supercomputer in GFlops, but are just now catching up to a mid-1990s Cray in main memory (4GB). I remember being fairly befuddled when I started college in 2000, and my CS dept's UltraSPARC servers were slower than my Pentium III in CPU, but had memory measured in a unit that I had only heard of being used for hard drive space.
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that such a thing existed.
It's not a fair comparison. A 90s mainframe would probably smoke an Air if they were competing on IOPS with a thousand connected users!
I wouldn't be too sure. The low-end 13" MacBook Air has a 1.7Ghz dual-core i5 processor, 4GB RAM, a 128GB SSD, and a Thunderbolt port providing two bidirectional 10Gb/s channels.
From what I can find, an IBM S/390 from the early 1990s could have up to 6 processors and 6 vector coprocessors, up to 9GB of internal storage, and up to 256 fiber-optic links running at 10MB/s (for an total bandwidth of a Thunderbolt port plus a USB 2.0 port).
I don't really know how fast the CPU and RAM were in the IBM mainframe, but I'd suspect the Air's clock speeds are high enough to make up for only having two processors, and the Air's SSD would make it much faster for data sets that don't fit in RAM.
And as for the reliability advantage a mainframe is supposed to have: you could buy several MBAs per month to act as hot-spares for the price of renting the mainframe, and the MBA has a UPS built-in.
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#28Alternatively I could have a 1980s computer like a Tandy 100 or Z88 be able to type exactly the same notes in a class but have it run for 10x as long as it did on it's original 4AA batteries
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#29A counterpoint: the Air still does not match the battery life of a TRS-80 Model 100 from 1983: 20 hours on 4 AA batteries. A Model 100 was pretty much the opposite of the iPad: great for creative activities (writing, taking notes, programming) but poor for consumption activities.
If you strictly limit the creative activities there are to ones that involve typing. I'll bet the iPad is way better at making music, drawing, photo and film editing, etc, etc.
Re: Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to forget that 1Gbit/second an insane amount of text / numberic data and 1990 was a LONG time ago. Just concider that the extimated monthly transfter acroos internet backbones in December 1990 was 1TB. That 1GBit lan cable was 100's of times faster than all of the internet backbones in 1990. So while, Mainframe software is vary efficent the hardware still sucked compared to modern systems. Just think a 1GBi…
An interesting aspect is how much more slowely memory sizes have caught up. Today's laptops can crush a 90s supercomputer in GFlops, but are just now catching up to a mid-1990s Cray in main memory (4GB). I remember being fairly befuddled when I started college in 2000, and my CS dept's UltraSPARC servers were slower than my Pentium III in CPU, but had memory measured in a unit that I had only heard of being used for…
A fair comparison though would have to be a modern Cray-class supercomputery thing to that Cray though. That's going to have more than 4GB of RAM; modern Cray equivalents open the bid at petabytes of RAM.