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These comparisons are fun at all but a better one would be the difference between whatever "computer" a citizen lambda would have used back in the day and the cray1 and whatever on can use now and the current "cray" (or whatever humans use now) and see the difference of cost.
Cray1 should be compared to nowadays raspberry pi pico 2 / rp2350 which has similar specs (using external ram).
I won't rest until the average microcontroller in an optical mouse is more powerful than a Cray 1.
...software... well, that's a different story.
While a cray could compute millions of things and did a bunch of usable stuff for many groups of people who used it back then, a raspberrypi today has trouble even properly displaying a weather forecast at "acceptable speeds", because modern software has become very bloated, and that includes weather forecast sites that somehow have to include autoplaying video, usually an ad.
What happened to the programs/problems the Cray 1 solved? If anyone can do it on commodity hardware - is it being done? Is it all solved?
What happened to the programs/problems the Cray 1 solved? If anyone can do it on commodity hardware - is it being done? Is it all solved?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won't rest until the average microcontroller in an optical mouse is more powerful than a Cray 1.
I'm not aware of any optical mouse using a general purpose MCU, to my knowledge they are all using ASICs
> 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.
Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.
What happened to the programs/problems the Cray 1 solved? If anyone can do it on commodity hardware - is it being done? Is it all solved?
And some problems are even more complex.
My father spent his career on researching coil forms for Stellerator fusion reactors. Finding the shapes for their experiments then was a huge computational problem using then-state of the art machines (incl. cray for a while) and even today's computing power isn't there, yet.
Other problems we now solve regularly on our phones ...
> 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.
Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.