4 ms·
A classic display of latency vs bandwidth. The DEC box wins on latency but the pi wins on bandwidth, for large enough tasks, anyway. A 2040 was a PDP-10 with
by VLM 11y ago
A classic display of latency vs bandwidth. The DEC box wins on latency but the pi wins on bandwidth, for large enough tasks, anyway.
A 2040 was a PDP-10 with a 30 MHz KL processor running around 30 MIPS and TOPS-20 (the source of the "20" in the name) a quarter century ago.
30e6 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 25 = about 4 e 14 instructions.
I can't get a straight answer but hundreds of MIPS sounds reasonable for a pi zero.
4e14 / 500e6 / 60 / 24 / 365 = about a year and a half
So sometime in 2017 a pi zero would finally catch up to a DECSystem-2040 which had a quarter century head start. Of course the 2040 has been continuously producing intermediate results for the first 25 years of the "race" while the pi output no results at all having not being invented yet. Also after 27 or so years the pi will somewhat surpass the 2040.
Also the IO bandwidth and scalability of old mainframes usually puts newer hardware to shame. "My calculator has more power than a 1960s NASA mainframe that sent men to the moon" "Oh so you're saying you've been to Mars, then?"
On one hand, 4e14 instructions executed would have been enough to run entire civilizations, some years ago. On the other hand, its not enough to boot modern Windows, although despite the difficulty is none the less not accomplishing anything in the real world.
- rjsw 11y agoI don't think a PDP-10 does all that well on a bandwidth comparison with a modern system, I would expect something like a Cubietruck with SATA and Gigabit Ethernet to win fairly easily.
- jacobush 11y agoBut ... the parent suggests a Pi wins on bandwidth.
- linker3000 11y agoDid any of the computing magazines of the era feature a free DEC-20 on the cover? Just wondering!
- VLM 11y agoSort of. About 30+ years ago the world was absolutely awash in Compuserve free/demo accounts, included in software boxes and probably magazines. Wish I could find an old 80micro magazine cover on archive.org to document this aspect of the past. People who lived thru it could verify that free compuserve accounts were the AOL floppy/CD of an older era. Compuserve in say 1983 was a DEC service bureau moonlighting at night as a very expensive per hour super BBS system. Like $5/hr at 300 baud. And yes it was a network of PDP-10s as per the linked article (although I seem to remember KI processors not KL's)
- salgernon 11y ago75460,1375 Why did you make me remember that! We used compuserve to support our (retail, boxed Mac) software. Then we had to expand to AOL to cover "the outsiders". And then... Eternal September. (Some day, "like us on Facebook" will be as obsolete as "AOL keyword BLAH", which you can still see at the ending credits of movies from the 90s. I don't recall a similar push for compuserve.)
- hga 11y agoOne other issue, the KL processor had 72 bit wide floating point hardware, it was a fast number cruncher in its day (one reason the follow one Jupiter CPU failed, it only had 36 bit wide FP hardware). The Pi Zero is ARMv6 and therefore has IEEE double precision 64 bit floating point, but move to the Pi 2 ARMv7 and you lose double precision in hardware....