The Cray-1 has a much better couch.
We need to bring back computer seating
Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
51–60 of 193 posts
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#52It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#53This is actually quite depressing considering the amount of Raspberry pi's doing tasks like watering a plant, Reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#54I'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell that, but I'm not sure what you're doing?" she said looking at the graphs on my screen. "I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer…
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.
About the same headline number as a $350 Xbox Series X! Although fp64 vs fp32 and Linpack vs peak.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#55I'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell that, but I'm not sure what you're doing?" she said looking at the graphs on my screen. "I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer…
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.
You forgot the best part: It was colloquially referred to as the “Big Mac”.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#56It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.
such a dystopian future... I hope we are not still using plastic then :)
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#57I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray-1 supercomputer, in a machine room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through. 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…
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Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#58Years 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?”
Have you seen houses from the 1920s -- she's not that far off
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
it’s easy to forget how many bits needs to be pushed down a graphics pipeline, per pixel, per frame. in fact forget the pipeline, just pushing the bits down the wire fast enough is a non-trivial task.
I agree. I was a bit too flip in my original comment; there are regular tasks now that simply require multiples of the data throughput that the 1980s Cray machines were capable of.
The simpler point I was aiming at was just that: the amount of computational power at the fingertips of so many of us is huge, and it's important to appreciate that.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#60Years 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?”
Have you seen houses from the 1920s -- she's not that far off
they say the 2020's is the new 1920's in that regard