In 2013 I'd just built a new top-spec PC. I looked up the performance and then back-calculated using the TOP500† and I believe it would have been the most powerful supercomputer in the world in about 1993. If you back-calculated further, I think around 1980 it became more powerful than every computer on the planet combined.
Cray versus Raspberry Pi
81–90 of 136 posts
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#82Earlier 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.
Tried explaining what a Tamagotchi was to someone recently. Looks of utter bewilderment
That is a natural reaction.
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#83> 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.
You should have been watching lots of SciFi, too. (-:
I have a Raspberry Pi in a translucent "modular case" from the PiHut.
* https://thepihut.com/products/modular-raspberry-pi-4-case-cl...
It is very close to the same size and appearance as the "key" for Orac in Blake's 7.
I have so far resisted the temptation to slap it on top of a Really Useful Box and play the buzzing noise.
* https://youtube.com/watch?v=XOd1WkUcRzY
Obviously not even Avon figured out that the main box of Orac was a distraction, a fancy base station to hold the power supply, WiFi antenna, GPS receiver, and some Christmas tree lights, and all of the computational power was really in the activation key.
The amusing thing is that that is not the only 1970s SciFi telly prop that could become almost real today. It shouldn't be hard -- all of the components exist -- to make an actual Space 1999 commlock; not just a good impression of one, but a functioning one that could do teleconferencing over a LAN, IR control for doors and tellies and stuff, and remote computer access.
Not quite in time for 1999, alas. (-:
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#84Reading 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…
First of all, how would they talk to it? You'd have to give them an RPI5 with serial console enabled, and strict instructions not to exceed the 3.3 volt limits of the I/O. Now it's reasonable that you could generate NTSC video out of it, so they could see on the screen any output. When you then explained it was just bit-banging said NTSC output, they'd be amazed even more.
Serial port
Cray 1 was released 1975, teletypes were old tech at that time.
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a small LLM, say, with 200–300K weights A "small Large Language Model", you say? So a "Language Model"? ;-) > Such an LLM could have handled grammar and code autocompletion, basic linting, or documentation queries and summarization. No, not even close. You're off by 3 orders of magnitude if you want even the most basic text understanding, 4 OOM if you want anything slightly more complex (like code autocompletion),…
I would have thought the same, but EXO Labs showed otherwise by getting a 300K-parameter LLM to run on a Pentium II with only 128 MB of RAM at about 50 tokens per second. The X-MP was in the same ballpark, with the added benefit of native vector processing (not just some extension bolted onto a scalar CPU) which performs very well on matmul. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... John Carmack…
> EXO Labs showed otherwise by getting a 300K-parameter LLM to run on a Pentium II with only 128 MB of RAM at about 50 tokens per second
50 token/s is completely useless if the tokens themselves are useless. Just look at the "story" generated by the model presented in your link: Each individual sentence is somewhat grammatically correct, but they have next to nothing to do with each other, they make absolutely no sense. Take this, for example:
"I lost my broken broke in my cold rock. It is okay, you can't."
Good luck tuning this for turn-based conversations, let alone for solving any practical task. This model is so restricted that you couldn't even benchmark its performance, because it wouldn't be able to follow the simplest of instructions.
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#86I guess I'm old because this hasn't really been that insightful of interesting observation just by itself anymore. People often talk about technological advancement of computing as if it is a force of nature whereas the amazing specs of say a rp2350 compared to the cray-1 is more of a story of the economies of scale as opposed to merely technical know-how and design. The reason a rp2350 is a few dollars is because of fabs, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge that likely dwarf the cost of producing a cray-1. I wouldn't even be surprised if someone bothered to do a similar calculation of the cost of infrastructure needed behind each cray-1 at the time that it could even be less what is needed to produce rp2350s today. The unit price of a rp2350 to consumers being so cheap (right now that fabs still want to make it) somewhat elides the actual costs involved.
Animats below said that the Cray-1 was made from discrete components. Good luck making a rp2350 from discrete components, it likely wouldn't even function well at the desired frequency due to speed of light and RF interference issues--it would likely be even worse for GHz broadcoms used in the rpi5. This means that in a post-apocolyptic future you could make another cray-1 given enough time and resources. In 20 years when the fabs have stopped making rp2350s there simply will not be any more of them.
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#87> 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.
> Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.
Maybe in 100 years. The talking car was more intelligent than Siri, Alexa or Hey Google.
It is not that we are not able to "talk" to computers, it is that we "talk" with computers only so that they can collect more data about us. Their "intelligence" is limited to simple text underestanding.
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Commodore 64 had text to speech in late 80s.
Yes, and Windows had Narrator. And that's all. Since 20 years.
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have thought the same, but EXO Labs showed otherwise by getting a 300K-parameter LLM to run on a Pentium II with only 128 MB of RAM at about 50 tokens per second. The X-MP was in the same ballpark, with the added benefit of native vector processing (not just some extension bolted onto a scalar CPU) which performs very well on matmul. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... John Carmack…
> EXO Labs showed otherwise by getting a 300K-parameter LLM to run on a Pentium II with only 128 MB of RAM at about 50 tokens per second 50 token/s is completely useless if the tokens themselves are useless. Just look at the "story" generated by the model presented in your link: Each individual sentence is somewhat grammatically correct, but they have next to nothing to do with each other, they make absolutely no sen…
You're missing the point. No one is claiming that a 300K-param model on a Pentium II matches GPT-4. The point is that it works: it parses input, generates plausible syntax, and does so using algorithms and compute budgets that were entirely feasible decades ago. The claim is that we could have explored and deployed narrow AI use cases decades earlier, had the conceptual focus been there.
Even at that small scale, you can already do useful things like basic code or text autocompletion, and with a few million parameters on a machine like a Cray Y-MP, you could reasonably attempt tasks like summarizing structured or technical documentation. It's constrained in scope, granted, but it's a solid proof of concept.
The fact that a functioning language model runs at all on a Pentium II, with resources not far off from a 1982 Cray X-MP, is the whole point: we weren’t held back by hardware, we were held back by ideas.
Re: Cray versus Raspberry Pi
#90Earlier 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.
Your car had a tiny record player.
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/but-wait-theres-more/a1875...