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"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1" edit: thank you for the Christmas present, yc algorithm. God bless us every one.
I’m more impressed that the cray was that fast such a long time ago tbh
Just before a big tour group of VIPs he knew would come by, he hid inside the Cray-1, and waited patiently for them to arrive.
Then he casually strolled out from inside the Cray-1, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved expression on his face, looked up startled at the tour group gaping at him through the window, and scurried off!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my favorite machines from Top500 is SystemX. https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ When it was commissioned in 2004, this array of 1100x Apple PowerPC 970 systems was the 7th most powerful computer on the list. It's Linpack Performance was 12,250.00 GFlop/s.
My favorite was the 33rd in line at the time which was made up of 1700 sony PS3s https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2010-12-air-plays...
Years ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”
When I see comparisons like this, the first thought I have is not the benchmarks, but rather what the most “heroic” real-world calculation of the day would have been on something like the Cray-1, and how to replicate those calculations today on something like a RPi. Weather/climate models? Rad-hydro? The fidelity would almost certainly be super low compared to modern FEA software, but it would be a fun exercise to tr…
The RPi, unlike the Cray-1, does not offer ample sitting space.
There's a line in the Jurassic Park book where a character is made suspicious by an offhand assertion (by Nedry) that he is using a multi XMP system . Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. Most times, presumably, it's the efficiency of the operations you are telling it to execute.
The lack of I/O to the cpu might be the counterpoint to this. A single (exposed) PCIe lane might be enough for any singular task, but you're likely to start bogging down your bandwidth if you need to do any serious simultaneous tasks like network above a gbit, nvme disk IO, additional display or additional parallel computing like a GPU.
I wonder where a Raspberry Pi Pico - based on the RP2040 fits in all of that.
If you compared integer operations it would be a lot closer, but that's not really what the cray was designed for. (The rp2040 at 125mhz * 2 cores is in a pretty similar range)