5 ms·
In 1996 you needed 1,600 sq ft of supercomputing hardware to reach the same mark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red
by remoquete 6y ago
In 1996 you needed 1,600 sq ft of supercomputing hardware to reach the same mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red
- ashton314 6y agoI like this metric: sq ft of supercomputer-year. It'd be fun to see comparisons of, say, phones, holding supercomputer-year constant.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoHow many libraries of Congress is that per second?
- tyingq 6y agoFor a little less distant comparison, you could buy a Sun E10k in 1997. It was roughly two full racks in size with 64 total Sparc CPUS delivering ~50GFlops. So 18 of those needed, 36 full racks of space, 1152 CPUs to get to 900GFlops. Each 10k is roughly 39"W x 50"D x 70"H, so about ~244 square feet of floor space for 18 of them, not including space needed around it. Including the space around it, it would be a typical 1BR apartment full of compute. Also, I assume the M1 does significantly better than 900 GFlops if you don't run it through the browser.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoEven more exciting would be a power use comparison, including for the air conditioning and other auxiliary support needs. Exciting times we live in
- tyingq 6y agoA single E10k fully populated needs 11,041 watts, not including the needed air conditioning. So 198kW for 18 of them. I don't know how to convert Btus/hr into power, but each E10k needs 37,165 Btus/hr of A/C. The Macbook Air M1 would be something lower than 30W, since that's what the power supply is rated for.
- zbrozek 6y agohttps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=37165+btu%2Fhour+in+watts https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=37165+btu%2Fhour+in+wa...
- Someone 6y ago“since that's what the power supply is rated for.“ Theoretically, that machine could use more power at full speed. That would mean you couldn’t charge it fast enough to keep it running at top speed forever, but that might not even be noticeable because you hit a heat limit earlier. In practice, I guess the power usage is lower, as https://support.apple.com/kb/SP825?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP825?locale=en_US says it has a 49.9‑watt‑hour lithium‑polymer battery. At 30W, you would run out of that in less than 2 hours (but again, at full speed, you probably hit a heat limit earlier)
- gspr 6y ago37165 BTU/h is roughly a quite convenient 10 BTU/s. 1 W is 1 J/s, and 1 BTU is about 1000 J. So the AC would need about 10 kW, or 180 kW for all of them. All in all the computers in the example thus come out at north of 400 kW for total power use. Yikes! That's a power reduction by a factor of more than 13,000 in less than two decades! Put differently: If your electrical power comes from burning coal, the 1997 alternative to the computing power of a single M1 would emit about 8000 kg of CO₂ per day. The equivalent of driving 80,000 km with a very modern gasoline car. The mind boggles!
- s-macke 6y agoAre we comparing single precision vs. double precision?
- onion2k 6y agoI assume the M1 does significantly better than 900 GFlops if you don't run it through the browser. What's being measured is loading something on to the GPU and running it there. It doesn't make much difference how it gets to the GPU.
- Wohlf 6y agoThis made me curious about GPU performance as well: GeForce 210 (2009): 39.36 GFLOPS GeForce GTX 980 Ti (2015): 6.060 TFLOPS GeForce RTX 3090 (2020): 35.58 TFLOPS
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoThe GT210 is just about the furthest thing from high end. The fastest single GPU model from that generation (GTX 285) is capable of ~700 tflops.
- acdha 6y ago700 GFLOPS, you mean?
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoYup, thanks.
- Dylan16807 6y agoRight, the low end models are excessively underpowered and only exists for niche cases or tricking people. -50 through -80 is a good baseline for normal, and even a GTS 250 is 387/470 gflops.
- justinclift 6y agoWikipedia lists it at just over 1TFLOP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_200_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_200_series Maybe it's another case of Wikipedia not being accurate (at this point in time)?
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoThat is actually funny because I sourced my number from Wikipedia too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proc... So there’s definitely something wrong there.
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- nullserver 6y agoIf the current trend continues we will have a chip the size of a plank unit with a 2020 level computing capacity the size of the Jupiter. Chat applications will be even slower then today
- neuronic 6y agoWhat will soon be the size of Jupiter is node_modules
- dmix 6y agoBad timing, the industry is about to move towards direct imports and much simpler dependency management thanks to the evolution of JS and likewise the tooling. If anything node modules will slowly fade away in the coming years. And not just with that node rewrite that links directly.
- rofrol 6y agoAny more info?
- neuronic 6y agoThank you for that info, I will consider it in the future. But before that happens and before these systems are widespread, it's going to be node_modules for another while. And someone will still somehow have a 500MB folder with node_modules in 2037, I just know it.
- DukeBaset 6y agoIf only I could give you gold
- dmix 6y agoI opened Discord after 2yrs of not using it, remembering a simple Slack like chat that was slightly better. I opened it again recently with all my old channels and it looks like they added a hundred new features I have no idea what they do or never would need. Discord is still a good product but makes you miss the simplicity. Or a simple IRC interface (although I've seen some IRC servers with a million plugins).
- uglycoyote 6y agoNow, imagine going back in time to 1996 and trying to explain to people in the supercomputer lab that 25 years later there would be legions of people using portable supercomputers because you need this to build javascript applications for websites