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Something that just dawned on me is how far we have come regarding the compute resources that are available to the average person living in the developed world.
by linguae 7y ago
Something that just dawned on me is how far we have come regarding the compute resources that are available to the average person living in the developed world. Consider the hardware that Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to start Google in 1998. According to this page (https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-hardware-circa-1999/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-hardware-circa-1999/), they had 10 processor cores running at speeds of 200-333MHz, 1.7GB RAM, and 366GB of distributed hard disk storage. This configuration probably cost them a minimum of $10,000 to build, probably more. Now consider the Raspberry Pi 4. If one spends $45 on the 2GB RAM variant and additional money for a 512 GB drive, then for roughly $100 he or she would have the same compute and storage resources that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in 1998 that started one of the world's most successful Web companies. In fact, our smartphones can drive 1998-era Google if configured with enough storage.
From a software standpoint, imagine the possibilities of millions of people walking around with devices that are as powerful as the compute resources Google had in 1998. It's realizations such as this that make me excited
What I love about the Raspberry Pi is the possibilities it brings at affordable prices. For example, students learning about how distributed systems work can build a cluster of Raspberry Pis for just a few hundred dollars. They have access to the same open source software that major tech companies use for their infrastructure, like Linux and various distributed software projects such as Apache Spark.
In an age where sometimes I'm cynical about the direction of tech and our industry, it's realizations such as this and product announcements like this new Raspberry Pi that make me remember why I love computing.
- W-Stool 7y agoConsider the Cray-1 supercomputer of the early 1980s - 100 MFLOPS for US$10M. A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks.
- vardump 7y ago> A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks. Yes. A slight correction, though: 100 GFLOPS per CPU core. Some new server Xeons can do 64 single precision FLOPS per cycle per core. Most other modern x86 CPUs can do up to 32 SP FLOPS per cycle per core. AFAIK, RPi4's Cortex A72 will have to do with just 8 FLOPS/cycle/core. Similar to original Intel Core, Nehalem and Penryn. FPU wise (and probably otherwise as well), per clock cycle, RPi4 is not far from the famous Core 2 Quad Q6600. :-) Or one Cortex A72 core @1.5 GHz has comparable floating point performance as a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 6 GHz. (These figures count one FPU multiply-add as two FLOPS, but that seems to be industry standard way...)
- bigiain 7y agoWith the right amount of drinks, I'd argue that architecturally a Cray1 is "spiritually closer" to a modern video card that a CPU... So you can get 4-5 teraflops for ~$500 that way...
- W-Stool 7y agoThe Cray-1 was a pure vector processor, like the Intel CPU math units. Aren't GPUs massively parallel processors? Quite different beasts if so.
- simonbyrne 7y agoNot to mention a Cray 1 used 115kW: the new raspberry pi uses 7W peak.
- Havoc 7y agoNoticing this with cloud capacity too. Employers throws 150 bucks of credit at me and I don’t really use it to even 10% of potential - me learning is the limitation not compute power
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoOn the other hand, look at how ridiculously powerful our computers are and they're still so slow. We've met orders of magnitude more computing power with orders of magnitude slower software.
- spacenick88 7y agoI hear this claim almost every day yet its been years since I've actually felt my normal work computers being slow. Hell, even booting an OS in an emulator running in a browser proper software still runs blazingly fast. It's just that some people seem to use an awful lot of terrible software but I don't seem to be one of those people
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoJust the other day there was a thread comparing start times for LibreOffice, where 3 seconds was considered good. Three seconds on modern hardware is a damned eternity. How much does LibreOffice do that Word 5.0 doesn't, really? Yet the latter would probably start inside an emulator faster than the former does natively.
- projektfu 7y agoMostly loading fonts and things.
- fao_ 7y ago> How much does LibreOffice do that Word 5.0 doesn't, really? It has to support and parse a billion more formats. Including the fact that MS word file formats are in some cases literal dumps from word's memory (iirc). Rendering things properly is also a difficult problem to solve. Look how difficult it has been for much of the 21st century, to get a webpage uniform across all major browsers, and then realised that you not only have to display the same across all major browsers, but also be 30 years backwards compatible.
- vetrom 7y ago