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.
Re:Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
by iancmceachern on Sunday December 24, 2023 @09:49PM
(#38759219)
My favorite was the 33rd in line at the time which was made up of 1700 sony PS3s
https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2010-12-air-plays...
When the DoE claimed the PS3 could be a dual purpose munition, they weren’t kidding.
Re:Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
by PaulRobinson on Monday December 25, 2023 @03:59AM
(#38760966)
Saddam Hussein did try to buy a load of PlayStations at some point.
He also had WMDs. /s
Re:Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
by iancmceachern on Monday December 25, 2023 @12:09PM
(#38764218)
And Anna Nicole married for love
(Great line in the movie Shooter"
They were more or less cousins, as they were both based on the PowerPC CPU architecture.
However the Sony Cell had just a PowerPC controlling core. The real magic, and why it was used in supercomputers at the time, is in its Stream cores; they were highly tailored for vector and floating point maths.
About the same headline number as a $350 Xbox Series X! Although fp64 vs fp32 and Linpack vs peak.
You forgot the best part: It was colloquially referred to as the “Big Mac”.
First capture - https://web.archive.org/web/20040724145729/http://www.tcf.vt...
Last capture - https://web.archive.org/web/20070606024231/http://www.tcf.vt...
An FAQ from somewhere in the middle - https://web.archive.org/web/20060708113430/http://www.tcf.vt...
Re:Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
by kevin_thibedeau on Sunday December 24, 2023 @09:02PM
(#38758949)
The other fun thing is to find out the most recent year your phone would have made the bottom of the top 500 list.
Re:Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
by bifftastic on Monday December 25, 2023 @01:43AM
(#38760389)
Looks like June 2002 for Pixel 8
"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 that filled an entire room, would you believe?"
"That's lovely. How will that help us pay our credit bills?"
Jesting aside. There is a bunch of data for this, like this set here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
And if you extrapolate backwards or find older data, like I did, I came to the conclusion that if I took my PC back to 1981 it would actually be faster than every computer on Earth combined, or some insane statistic like that.