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Cray versus Raspberry Pi

aardvark.co.nz

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Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#31

Post by DrillShopper »

heelix wrote: post #30
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.

The self driving aspect, amazingly, is already here and considered mundane.

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.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#32

Post by dizhn »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #5
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.

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)

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#33

Post by _fat_santa »

Reading this I wonder, say we did have a time machine and were somehow able to give scientists back in the day access to an RPI5. What sort of crazy experiments would that have spawned?

I'm sure when the Cray 1 came out, access to it must have been very restricted and there must have been hoards of scientists clamoring to run their experiments and computations on it. What would have happened if we gave every one of those clamoring scientists an RPI5?

And yes I know this raises an interface problem of how would they even use one back in the day but lets put that to the side and assume we figured out how to make an RPI5 behave exactly like a Cray 1 and allowed scientists to use it in a productive way.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#34

Post by tekla »

DrillShopper wrote: post #31
heelix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self driving aspect, amazingly, is already here and considered mundane.

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.

A Tesla is pretty close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZfkU1QgTI

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#35

Post by ptero »

DrillShopper wrote: post #31
heelix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self driving aspect, amazingly, is already here and considered mundane.

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.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#36

Post by Havoc »

Finding more & more that power efficiency is what's driving me towards new gear rather than lack of horsepower.

A few niche uses aside (gaming, llm) a vaguely modern desktop is good enough regardless of details.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#37

Post by Havoc »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #5
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.

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

Tried explaining what a Tamagotchi was to someone recently. Looks of utter bewilderment

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#38

Post by kayodelycaon »

zouhair wrote: post #17

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.

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 thousands of rack-mounted servers and the associated networking hardware.

My rough guess would be the difference in 2024 iphones to mainframes is an order of magnitude more between them than Cray and anything else on the market at the time.

It’s also interesting to note how much software has changed. The actual machine code may be less optimized, but we have better algorithms and we have the option of using vast amounts of memory and disk to save cpu time. And that’s before we get into specialized hardware.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#40

Post by dmd »

DrillShopper wrote: post #31
heelix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self driving aspect, amazingly, is already here and considered mundane.

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.
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