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A comment on Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Efficiency. Parent comment

Re:Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Effici... by _delirium on Wednesday September 14, 2011 @05:31PM (#2997944)
An interesting aspect is how much more slowely memory sizes have caught up. Today's laptops can crush a 90s supercomputer in GFlops, but are just now catching up to a mid-1990s Cray in main memory (4GB). I remember being fairly befuddled when I started college in 2000, and my CS dept's UltraSPARC servers were slower than my Pentium III in CPU, but had memory measured in a unit that I had only heard of being used for hard drive space.
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Re:Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Effici... by jerf on Wednesday September 14, 2011 @06:18PM (#2998082)
A fair comparison though would have to be a modern Cray-class supercomputery thing to that Cray though. That's going to have more than 4GB of RAM; modern Cray equivalents open the bid at petabytes of RAM.
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Re:Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Effici... by _delirium on Wednesday September 14, 2011 @06:36PM (#2998127)
Oh, I agree modern supercomputers beat 1995-era ones on all axes; it's mostly the different rates at which consumer-class computers catch up that are interesting. A modern MacBook Pro wipes the floor, CPU-wise, with a 1995 Cray, but only just matches it RAM-wise. So comparisons like "today's [consumer thing] is as good as [year's] [enterprise thing]" depend heavily on whether you're comparing them on CPU or RAM.
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Re:Air Battery Would Last 2.5s on Machine with 1990's Effici... by aheilbut on Wednesday September 14, 2011 @07:34PM (#2998272)
There are few, if any, current systems with petabytes of RAM; the very largest have tens to hundreds of terabytes.
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