Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 14, 2011, 10:24 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #26

onemoreact wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

Post by mortenjorck » Wed, Sep 14, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

roc wrote: post #5

Bud wrote: post #2

Um, 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 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).

Post by hristov » Wed, Sep 14, 2011, 10:40 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #7

roc wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

Post by pjscott » Wed, Sep 14, 2011, 10:44 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #2

Um, 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.

Post by ars » Wed, Sep 14, 2011, 11:11 PM UTC

flamingbuffalo wrote: post #36

ugh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing is important – but not everything.

exactly. I've posted this before, but: "if a person can't produce something on an ipad that's a reflection of the user, not the device."