3 ms·

Well, kinda, sorta, but as mighty as the RP2040 is, it still pales to the Cray-1 of '76 with its 8MiB of RAM and 160MFLOPS. The RP2040 beats the Cray for sure

Well, kinda, sorta, but as mighty as the RP2040 is, it still pales to the Cray-1 of '76 with its 8MiB of RAM and 160MFLOPS. The RP2040 beats the Cray for sure in the MIPS/$ category though :)

mk_stjames 4y ago
Yea, sadly the two things I wish the RP2040 could have- more SRAM (it only has 264kb) and onboard floating point in hardware. Other than that I love them and I am using Picos for experimentation now. The Cray M1 may have only been clocked at 80mhz but the FPU could do a floating point mult + add in parallel making the "160 MFLOPS". It's similar to the performance of an ESP32, I think, which is a great FLOPS/$ comparison. A Cray-1 adjusted for inflation would be $35,000,000. A ESP32-S3 dev board is $6.
- GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
  Most embedded chips have much less RAM in the M0+ space; they tend to have more Flash. The interesting choices for the 2040 are: 1. More RAM than usual, using ext SPI Flash to load RAM 2. Fancy programmable peripherals 3. TWO cores 4. Very flexible IO mapping. Others do IO mapping, but it's really nice on 2040 5. "Pretty fast" at 133 MHz and the Total Win (for me) 6. Integrated into Arduino IDE As for Floating Point, there are some great packages out there that are optimized for Cortex-M https://www.quinapalus.com/qfplib-m0-tiny.html https://www.quinapalus.com/qfplib-m0-tiny.html There also Q-notation, which uses integer HW to do a sort-of fixed-point 'float'. We used this extensively in the 2016 Model X body controls, because the falcon wing door was totally controlled without a floating point processor! That was hard to do... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(number_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(number_format) Motorola, err, I mean, Freescale provided an excellent library for their automotive-qual PowerPC MPUs.

3 ms·

Well, kinda, sorta, but as mighty as the RP2040 is, it still pales to the Cray-1 of '76 with its 8MiB of RAM and 160MFLOPS. The RP2040 beats the Cray for sure

by guenthert 4y ago

Well, kinda, sorta, but as mighty as the RP2040 is, it still pales to the Cray-1 of '76 with its 8MiB of RAM and 160MFLOPS. The RP2040 beats the Cray for sure in the MIPS/$ category though :)

mk_stjames 4y ago
Yea, sadly the two things I wish the RP2040 could have- more SRAM (it only has 264kb) and onboard floating point in hardware. Other than that I love them and I am using Picos for experimentation now. The Cray M1 may have only been clocked at 80mhz but the FPU could do a floating point mult + add in parallel making the "160 MFLOPS". It's similar to the performance of an ESP32, I think, which is a great FLOPS/$ comparison. A Cray-1 adjusted for inflation would be $35,000,000. A ESP32-S3 dev board is $6.
- GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
  Most embedded chips have much less RAM in the M0+ space; they tend to have more Flash. The interesting choices for the 2040 are: 1. More RAM than usual, using ext SPI Flash to load RAM 2. Fancy programmable peripherals 3. TWO cores 4. Very flexible IO mapping. Others do IO mapping, but it's really nice on 2040 5. "Pretty fast" at 133 MHz and the Total Win (for me) 6. Integrated into Arduino IDE As for Floating Point, there are some great packages out there that are optimized for Cortex-M https://www.quinapalus.com/qfplib-m0-tiny.html https://www.quinapalus.com/qfplib-m0-tiny.html There also Q-notation, which uses integer HW to do a sort-of fixed-point 'float'. We used this extensively in the 2016 Model X body controls, because the falcon wing door was totally controlled without a floating point processor! That was hard to do... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(number_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(number_format) Motorola, err, I mean, Freescale provided an excellent library for their automotive-qual PowerPC MPUs.