41–50 of 136 posts
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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
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 t…
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 t…
When you then explained it was just bit-banging said NTSC output, they'd be amazed even more.
For parity, you have to move up to a raspberry pi zero 2, which costs $15 and uses about 2W of powerm
A million times cheaper than a cray in 2025 dollars and quite a bit more capable.
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 t…
> 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.
A modest PDP-11/34 cluster with AP-120 vector coprocessors might even have served as a cheaper pathfinder in the late 70s for labs and companies who couldn't afford a Cray 1 and its infrastructure.
But we lacked both the data and the concepts. Massive, curated datasets (and backpropagation!) weren’t even a thing until the late 80s or 90s. And even then, they ran on far less powerful hardware than the Crays. Ideas and concepts were the limiting factor, not the hardware.
Another comparison that is equally astonishing to the RPi is that modern GPUs have exceeded Whitted’s prediction. Turner’s paper used 640x480 images. At that resolution, extrapolating the 160 Mflops number, 1 Cray per pixel would be 49 Tera flops. A 4080 GPU has just shy of 50 Tflops peak performance, so it has surpassed what Turner thought we’d need.
Think about that - not just faster than a Cray for a lot less money, but one cheap consumer device is faster than 300,000 Crays.(!) Faster than a whole Cray per pixel. We really have come a long, long way.
The 5090 has over 300 Tflops of ray tracing perf, and the Tensor cores are now in the Petaflops range (with lower precision math), so we’re now exceeding the compute needed for 1 Cray per pixel at 1080p. 1 GPU faster than 2M Crays. Mind blowing.
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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