5 ms·
I'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell
by qingcharles 3y ago
I'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell that, but I'm not sure what you're doing?" she said looking at the graphs on my screen.
"I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer that filled an entire room, would you believe?"
"That's lovely. How will that help us pay our credit bills?"
Jesting aside. There is a bunch of data for this, like this set here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
And if you extrapolate backwards or find older data, like I did, I came to the conclusion that if I took my PC back to 1981 it would actually be faster than every computer on Earth combined, or some insane statistic like that.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThe other fun thing is to find out the most recent year your phone would have made the bottom of the top 500 list.
- bifftastic 3y agoLooks like June 2002 for Pixel 8
- hulitu 3y agoMy phone is so dumb down that any comparison is useless. It is like driving a Ferrari through a corn field.
- shagie 3y agoOne of my favorite machines from Top500 is SystemX. https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ When it was commissioned in 2004, this array of 1100x Apple PowerPC 970 systems was the 7th most powerful computer on the list. It's Linpack Performance was 12,250.00 GFlop/s.
- iancmceachern 3y agoMy favorite was the 33rd in line at the time which was made up of 1700 sony PS3s https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2010-12-air-plays...
- Cacti 3y agoWhen the DoE claimed the PS3 could be a dual purpose munition, they weren’t kidding.
- PaulRobinson 3y agoSaddam Hussein did try to buy a load of PlayStations at some point.
- hulitu 3y agoHe also had WMDs. /s
- iancmceachern 3y agoAnd Anna Nicole married for love (Great line in the movie Shooter"
- Cockbrand 3y agoThey were more or less cousins, as they were both based on the PowerPC CPU architecture.
- porbelm 3y agoHowever the Sony Cell had just a PowerPC controlling core. The real magic, and why it was used in supercomputers at the time, is in its Stream cores; they were highly tailored for vector and floating point maths.
- 3y ago