11 ms·
Raspberry Pi Zero vs. Elliott 405
- vinceyuan 11y agoWeight: 9g vs 3-6 tons Price: $5 vs £85,000 (1957) Amazing technology advance!
- return_0e 11y agoAlso within that timespan, 1.2MB of magnetic film vs 8GB MircoSD card (upto 128GB on a Pi Zero?) That's Moore's Law in action!
- return_0e 11y agoedit: Specifically to storage, the Moore's Law equivalent is Kryder's Law, named after Mark Kryder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder
- listic 11y agoInteresting tidbit: Pi Zero is really $5, despite being British, too.
- perlpimp 11y agosomething irks me about retrospective and I've seen it all. retrospective steals from daring by making ourself feel good about progress done. Fight the retrospective! do outrageous stuff with this bit of tech today. I say this with insight how this uneasy bright kid does weird stuff with things people don't look at. I think - leave history to historians.
- adam12 11y ago£85,000 (1957) ≈ £1,895,500 (2015) ≈ $2,852,680 (2015)
- radoslawc 11y agoBTW Elliot had quite interesting memory design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
- haberman 11y agoAwesome. The only thing that would make this chart better is seeing the factor of improvement on each stat. The differing units make it harder to eyeball than it could be. Also would be cool if the price was inflation-adjusted.
- drcode 11y agoThe cost efficiency of the Elliot, adjusted for inflation, was 1445 dollars per cpu cycle per second (when running at the listed peak speed) For the Pi Zero, it is 0.000000005 dollars per cpu cycle per second.
- masklinn 11y agoThat doesn't take in account instruction-level parallelism, and of course the Elliot didn't have a global clock so the idea of CPU cycles doesn't really make sense.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoJust for fun, if you extrapolate to 2065 you get something so small it's invisible and practically free, with a cycle time in the hard x-ray to gamma range, more than 150TB of main memory, and an output bandwidth comfortably fast enough for at least ten life-size holographic displays.
- andrepd 11y agoA funny exercise, though sadly we will not see the growth rates we saw this past decades for the next 50 years.
- girvo 11y agoWhile I honestly agree, people have been saying that for decades...
- gozo 11y agoWhile "raw" progress is always fun, there's so much untapped potential in software that I'm not sure how much it matters. You stick one, two, three or a hundred ARM chips in a computer and, currently, it wouldn't really matter. The limits today are things like ecosystem, development process, robustness etc. at least for personal computer applications.
- sklogic 11y agoYes, today it would not really matter. But in the early 90s we knew what to do with such a massively parallel architecture - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language)
- nan0 11y agoI think I prefer the Elliott 405 than the Raspberry Pi Zero ! (Joke)
- clarkmoody 11y agoTechnological progress is an excellent example of how deflation helps the average person. Your money buys more and more compute power each year. Central banks are targeting inflation, which slowly robs the saver of purchasing power. Areas with high government regulation and control suffer from price inflation, where you get less and less each year for the same money: healthcare, education, war.
- PKop 11y agoAnd though prices are continually falling for tech goods, people do not refrain from buying (as the myth says they will). You know the iPhone you buy today will be much less next year, but you still buy because it serves a purpose for you now. They only type of spending perpetually lower prices would probably decrease is speculative buying. If you don't need a particular good now, you may wait knowing the price will fall. But this is also a good thing.
- julianz 11y agoDisagree, I've refrained from buying several products in recent years because I know if I can keep the old one going for one or two more product generations then the new one will be much, much better. It also influences my choice of product, I'm more likely to get something high end and keep it for longer.
- PKop 11y agoOK, but in a general sense, the number of computing devices being purchased continues to grow. Apple keeps setting iPhone sales records. Your examples, I would argue, are a good thing. People buy only when they absolutely need these goods, not because they are afraid they need to buy in excess now because their savings is going to lose value relative to the cost of these goods. They get full use out of the goods they purchase. Less wasteful spending, and wasteful use of resources needed to produce them. Moore's law illustrates that the cost of computing power has continually fallen. The industry has certainly not suffered because of this, would you agree? So without putting to fine a point on it: The tech industry is as healthy as any in the entire economy. And yet, prices fall faster than just about any other. Consumers unambiguously benefit from these falling prices. Keep this in mind when economists or politicians sing the praises of "mild" inflation. This would certainly benefit governments who want to run a deficit and spend money they have to borrow. But I'd argue this does not benefit the consumer. Thought experiment: will you plan on spending more on discretionary items (entertainment, vacation, home remodeling, investments, whatever...) if you anticipate / observe rising prices on staples such as food, healthcare, rent/mortgage, gas, utilities, etc? Or, will you spend more on discretionary items if you anticipate / observe falling prices on those same items? Your available budget will be greater and of course your spending will increase in these areas if you have more money to spend. So the utility, or benefit you receive as a result is clearly higher. Debtors benefit from rising prices because they can pay off debt with cheaper currency. So, as previously mentioned government, the biggest debtor, promotes inflationary policy.
- billybilly1920 11y agoAt least the Elliott 405 shipped with IO devices.
- agumonkey 11y agoand that case.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Jerry2 11y agoIn tech space, even 9 years can produce 1000x results. I love this microSD storage example, 2005 vs 2014: http://i.imgur.com/1jyVev4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/1jyVev4.jpg
- StavrosK 11y agoNine years to change one letter? Jeez, and we pretend that technology moves fast.
- broodbucket 11y ago3 letters, the X makes it sound cool.
- stordoff 11y agoI had a similar realisation a few days ago - I was putting a new microSD card in my phone, and realised that it represented 100 times the storage of my first PC (200GB vs 2GB). I still get a feeling of "this shouldn't be able to store this much" every time I use a microSD card.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y agoI love looking at MicroSD cards and imagining how, in your example there are 1,600,000,000,000 individual storage units inside it. That's 200 x a billion x eight.
- vive-la-liberte 11y ago>this shouldn't be able to store this much Same here. I was thinking about how many CD-ROMs it would take to store a certain amount of information, as a measure of just how much data something amounted to. Then I thought that with microSD cards, the same amount of data would sound much less impressive.
- Evolved 11y ago
- Gracana 11y agoDon't let anyone fool you, at six tons the 405 is almost 25 times more computer per dollar than the Raspberry Pi. Now that's value!
- StavrosK 11y agoI have a boulder to sell you that you're gonna love!
- mikeash 11y agoThe other day, I was looking at a smart lock on Amazon, and they listed the price per ounce. I think you may be on to something.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y agoIn Australian supermarkets the cost per unit weight net (typically 100 grams) has to be printed on shelf under / next to the price. I've proposed the idea that the price of everything in the supermarket be averaged per unit weight, checking out then becomes just a matter of weighing the trolley / basket. I see complications / gaming the system, fun idea though. Maybe just knowing how much you spend per average kg of food, or per unit of energy, could be a useful metric for optimizing food expenses.
- neves 11y agoExcuse me for the digression, but the best thing of this post was to reencounter with Mr. Spinellis blog. I love his books (there's a new one!) and since I ditched RSS readers, I've never more visited it. I advice you to spend some time there.
- akhilcacharya 11y agoI'd like to see a more recent comparison, honestly. Where can I find that? (10 years, for instance)
- brandonmenc 11y agoInteresting, but crazier is that the Zero kicks the snot out of the laptop I took to college in 1997.
- vinceyuan 11y agoI submitted the same post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689371 11 hours ago. But 4 hours ago, dang moved my comment to this post which was created 3 hours ago. It's very weird.
- grp 11y agoA kind of time travel, welcome!
- guylepage3 11y agoHaha. Love this. I just setup my PiZero to run Blockstore this weekend. I'm absolutely amazing by this little machine. Was actually blown away with the speed even though it's 1/2G of RAM. Impressed.
- daveguy 11y agoBlown away with the speed even though it's 512MB ram... Are you, by chance, coming from a windows os? If so, welcome!
- arbuge 11y agoThe comparison starts to look different if you include an "Availability Date" row...
- userbinator 11y agoOne thing that's missing from the comparison is that the Elliott 405 likely came with a full set of documentation, down to the circuit level, whereas Broadcom has kept much of the Pi's SoC details proprietary. In 60 years, archives and museums will still have great primary-source information on the Elliott 405 and its contemporaries. Will the same be true of the Pi? It's easy to focus on the smaller, cheaper, faster, but it must be realised that a significant amount of openness has been lost; and not merely because computers have become more complex, but also because there are commercial interests strongly discouraging us from understanding the details of how these machines work.
- ben174 11y agoAnother thing people always miss is that - unlike the Elliot 405 - the Pi doesn't come with a keyboard. That's where they get ya.
- byuu 11y agoNah, it's the storage: "8 GB (typical micro SD flash card - not included)" Which one's the better value now, huh? (I mean, given it's no PS Vita memory card, but still ...)
- janekm 11y agoThe Elliot 405 also didn't come with a keyboard. There was a panel of switches available for the original model... I'm sure you could get some sort of keyboard as an accessory for later models, but it certainly didn't come included.
- madez 11y agoI hope governments will intervene and force companies to publish all technical documentation, eventually, at least of older devices.
- userbinator 11y agoUnfortunately these companies will have mostly destroyed ("securely disposed of" is the usual phrasing) such documentation, because it is of little use to them to keep it around for something they neither make nor support anymore, and they don't want to leak any secrets.
- BocceBaal 11y agoThe Raspberry Pi Zero even compares favorably to the Cray 1 supercomputer from 1975.
- rebootthesystem 11y agoThe part that's missing in the comparison: Elliot 405: Used to run business calculations Pi Zero: Used run a sprinkler system What has been really interesting to me over the last several years that these stick computers have been around is how people are using giga-Hertz range processors with an huge operating system and truckloads of memory for stuff that's easily done with a small 8 bit processor with K's of RAM vs G's of ram and a simple time-sliced tasking mini OS written in an afternoon. Don't get me wrong, it's great that one can buy a computer like the Pi Zero for $5. I'm afraid something is being lost in the process. Maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, if one can get something the size of your pinky that cost less than coffee at Starbucks to run Linux...
- soared 11y agoHow many people do you really think can just casually write an OS? I can set up automated almost anything with almost no lines of code. We've lose the specialization because so many people now have access to these incredible things.
- Someone 11y agoPeople not being able to write an OS is part of "I'm afraid something is being lost in the process" You don't need a memory allocator, file system or scheduler for an 'OS' that runs a single task.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoNothing is being lost in the process as long as we continue to churn out people who are still interested in the low-level bits of the process. I used to point out to people that the control algorithm they were so laboriously writing on their PIC/AVR (now Arduino...) could be replaced with a 20 cent transistor and a handful of diodes and resistors. For exactly the same reason: the overkill bugged me and I was bothered that "kids today" weren't learning things "the right way." Then I began to shut up because I realized I was looking at progress. We don't need experts in analog electronics to build basic control systems: a web hacker who learns C can handle the simple stuff (emphasis on simple). Likewise, I now find myself telling others to forget about building 555 timer circuits or elaborate digital contraptions to sequence their LEDs and relays and just buy a $5 Arduino Nano and get it done in a few minutes. It's progress!
- varjag 11y agoWhat difference it makes if all it does is blinking a LED?
- xedarius 11y agoOn thing missing from the top trump card is power consumption.
- philip142au 11y agoCould have someone made a microchip in 1957 if they just "knew enough", I mean, if you sent someone back in time to 1957 with today's knowledge, could someone build a microchip from today back then?
- Cyph0n 11y agoThe answer is no. Today's integrated circuits are all manufactured using extremely precise equipment not available back then. Furthermore, the designs are impossible to execute by hand and require complex software, not to mention extensive verification. For a CPU like that of the Zero (ARM11), we're talking about at the very least upwards of 100 million transistors on a single chip. Only by simulating the design can you actually catch that single incorrectly biased MOSFET. Think software debugging, but on a whole different level. Then you have all the other components on the Zero responsible for tasks ranging from power management, networking, graphics processing, clocking, sound processing, and so on.