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Cray versus Raspberry Pi

aardvark.co.nz

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Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#51

Post by more_corn »

dmd wrote: post #40
DrillShopper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can do all that in a Waymo except for the “buy” part. When asked about that Sergey said “why do you want to own a car? You have to maintain it, insure it, park it at home and at work. Don’t you really just want to get where you’re going and have someone else figure out the rest?” This was back before google ate the evil pill. Now their philosophy is more like “don’t fall asleep, we can get a good deal on your kidneys, after that we’ll sell your mom’s kidneys too”

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#52

Post by magicalhippo »

dahart wrote: post #49

My former boss (Steve Parker, RIP) shared a story of Turner Whitted making predictions about how much compute would be needed to achieve real-time ray tracing, some time around when his seminal paper was published (~1980). As the story goes, Turner went through some calculations and came to the conclusion that it’d take 1 Cray per pixel. Because of the space each Cray takes, they’d be too far apart and he thought the…

> 1 Cray per pixel would be 49 Tera flops. A 4080 GPU has just shy of 50 Tflops peak performance

Interesting, wonder how it compares in terms of transistors. How many transistors combined did one Cray have in compute and cache chips?

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#53

Post by qooiii2 »

jgalt212 wrote: post #15
benob wrote: post #11

Cray1 should be compared to nowadays raspberry pi pico 2 / rp2350 which has similar specs (using external ram).

I won't rest until the average microcontroller in an optical mouse is more powerful than a Cray 1.

A lot of touchscreens meet that requirement. Turns out it's often cheaper to solve problems with algorithms than avoid them by design.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#54

Post by einsteinx2 »

hoppp wrote: post #2

The cray 1 did look futuristic like something out of star trek. It kinda reminded me of the trash can mac. I wonder if it was inspiration for it

> It kinda reminded me of the trash can mac. I wonder if it was inspiration for it

Ironically the trash can Mac actually looked strikingly similar in size and shape to actual small trash cans that were all over the Apple campus when I worked there. I’d see them in the cafeteria every day. They were aluminum though, but otherwise very similar. I always wondered if they had anything to do with the design of the computer, even if only subconsciously.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#55

Post by giantrobot »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #38
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 th…

Mainframes aren't supercomputers. The point of a mainframe (anymore) is reliable transactions without downtime. They're not necessarily beasts at computation.

Supercomputers were and are beasts of not only computation but memory size and bandwidth. They're used for tasks where the computation is highly parallel but the memory is not. If you're doing nuclear physics or fluid dynamics every particle in a simulation has some influence on every other. The more particles and more state for each particle you can store and apply to every other particle makes for a more accurate simulation.

As SCs have improved in memory size and bandwidth simulations/modeling with them has gotten more accurate and more useful.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#56

Post by Y_Y »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #8

> If AI systems continue to improve at the current rate and we combine that with improvements in hardware that are measured in orders of magnitude every 15 years or so then it stands to reason that we'll get that "super-intelligent GAI" system any day now. Oh come off it now. This could have been just a good blog post that didn't make me want to throw my phone across the room. GenAI is a hell of a drug. It's shocking…

> it stands to reason that

The upper-class "trust me bro"

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#57

Post by ForOldHack »

Adjust the price of the Cray-1, for inflation, but not the power, for Moore's law? Need I get my napkin out for a few calculations? or do we just FORGET MOORE'S LAW ( that is mention no less that 4 times, without quantification? Cray-1 (1976 ). RPi ( 2012 ). 37 years of elapsed time. 24. 2/3 elapsed generations. 26,509,000 times increase in power. Cray 1 160Mf. In a 26M times faster, would yield 4,241Gf ( 4.2Pf) , while the PI1 is capable of 13.5Gf, so the RPi-1 ( 2012 ) is about 0.31% of where Moore's law power doubling is.

Now lets compare this to the top 500. ( see the point? )( do not speak of Moore's law, while ignoring the mathematical implications. ) ( and yes, 3/1000s is three thousandths ).

Top 500 is 1.7 Exaflops, but by Moore's law should be 4,241Gf or 4.2Xf. So the top 500 is not keeping up with Moore's law.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#59

Post by bigfatkitten »

tekla wrote: post #34
DrillShopper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They’ve been “close” for over a decade now.

Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi

#60

Post by bsoles »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #10
sublinear wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that point not almost a decade ago?

Not really. My 1983 Datsun would talk, but it couldn't converse. Alexa and Siri couldn't hold a conversation anywhere near the level KITT did. There's a big difference. With LLMs, we're getting close.

Commodore 64 had text to speech in late 80s.

Also, my friend's father in the 80s was the driver of a French Consulate's member in Turkey. His car (a Renault) had speech functionality.

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