6 ms·
Comparing the 1970's Cray-1 supercomputer against the Raspberry Pi
- klelatti 3y agoNothing against AdaFruit, but this really should link to Roy Longbottom's detailed comparisons [1] that this very short post links to. [1] http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...
- milliams 3y agoSpecifically, the Raspberry Pi section at http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm#anchor22 http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...
- pge 3y agoAnd the HN discussion of that link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38758355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38758355
- jacquesm 3y agoIndeed, it's a reblog of a reblog of an absolutely excellent article.
- Fnoord 3y agoThe article mentions "See Longbottom’s extensive tests and comparisons article here." and [1]. This was already mentioned in a snapshot of 18 Jan 2024 [2] so it wasn't added after your criticism. [1] http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P... [2] https://archive.is/a99i3 https://archive.is/a99i3
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jermaustin1 3y agoThis is actually mildly surprising to me that the Raspberry Pi is only 4.5x faster. I would have bet 10-20x faster just because of how much time has passed and all the talk about: "your cellphone is 1000x faster than the Apollo computers" that I've been hearing since the time of the t-mobile sidekick. I've always taken them with a grain of salt, but even if they were only an order of magnitude off, a Pi is loads faster than a sidekick. And sure the Cray is loads faster than the Apollo computers, but I wouldn't have thought it was THAT much faster. I am amazed.
- snek_case 3y agoThe Cray 1 was way ahead of its time. It implemented SIMD vector instructions to speed up numerical computation, was liquid cooled, and ran at 80 MHz (in 1976). The chief architect, Seymour Cray, was kind of a genius, and is responsible for designing many other pioneering machines. Also, fun fact, it didn't have a CPU. It used all discrete logic chips, and was wired by hand, with lots and lots of wire. IIRC Seymour Cray liked to hire women to do the wiring job, because they had an easier time fitting inside the computer core to wire it, and doing detailed work because they had smaller hands.
- msla 3y ago> Also, fun fact, it didn't have a CPU. It used all discrete logic chips, and was wired by hand, That's how CPUs were built back then. What it didn't have was a single-chip CPU, or a microprocessor. Next up: "The Model T Ford didn't have an engine, it had this gasoline-burning device to provide motive power."
- drfuchs 3y agoLots and lots of wire, yes, with each one cut to a specific length so that all of each gate's input signals arrive at the same time. That's why the backplane looks like a mess of wires hanging down due to seemingly being way too long.
- dragontamer 3y agoNote that modern RAM has length matched traces. Take a look at all the PCB traces near RAM and CPU. You can see them 'squiggle' looking for matching-space at either end of the RAM/CPU connection. PCBs make things like consistent length matching easier. All circuit boards have near identical lengths, controlled impedances and other features that support ... Well... Effectively 6-billion baudrates for DDR5. 6000Mhz DDR5 with 64-bits per half-clock (3000Mhz clock so 6000 transfers per second) has a bit every 5 centimeters or so.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThe Cray-1 has better upholstery.
- eropple 3y agoCan't sit on a Raspberry Pi. What's even the point? Well, alright, you can sit on one once.
- rescbr 3y agoYou can sit on one many times, it's small enough that your weight is distributed over it by your own buttocks :)
- rob74 3y ago...but imagine the computing power if you cram all the empty space under your couch full of Raspberry Pis! You could have hundreds of Crays in there!
- nerdbert 3y agoSomeone's working on that. http://www.clustered-pi.com/blog/clustered-pi-zero.html http://www.clustered-pi.com/blog/clustered-pi-zero.html
- coldpie 3y agoMy dad worked in Facilities at the Minnesota Supercomputer Center (or maybe it was Cray, or maybe it was Control Data, or maybe it was NetASPx, or maybe it was something else, I was never clear to be honest) here on Washington Ave in Minneapolis. Sometimes as a kid in the 90s, he'd take me in to follow him around for a day. I definitely remember looking at the server racks and supercomputers they had on their main floor, watching automated tape backup machines move tapes around, all these crazy water cooling setups with colored lights, stuff like that. I even got to see the big diesel backup generators in the basement once. But the standout was the decommissioned Cray-1 they had as a seating bench in the front lobby. Could walk inside the unit and look at all the wires and circuit boards connected together, or just sit on the nice padded bench and have a chat. If you really knew what you were doing, you could lift up the seat panels and have a look at more boards and wires. Fun stuff.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago> “The Raspberry Pi ... is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.” The applications have grown as well. The Cray 1 was used for mundane tasks like "large-scale scientific applications, such as simulating complex physical phenomena, and was sold to government and university laboratories." [1] But the power of the Raspberry Pi allows for cutting edge computing tasks like "watering plants, monitoring the birds in your yard, or for a smart doorbell!" [2] [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cray-1 https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cray-1 [2] https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/the-7-most-common-uses-for-the-raspberry-pi-in-2023/ https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/the-7-most-common-uses-fo...
- reaperducer 3y agoI know it's only January, but this strikes me as Comment of the Year.
- flenserboy 3y agoImagine the pain of programming a Cray-1 to do the work of a Raspberry Pi in those use instances.
- bombcar 3y agoOr using a Raspberry Pi to simulate nuclear explosions and the weather.
- d_sem 3y agoThe absurdism to having a replica Cray-1 for the sole purpose of watering my plants is too amazing to not entertain.
- aw4y 3y agothe main difference is that I cannot hold 10 crays in my desk drawer waiting to use them :P
- Frenchgeek 3y agohttps://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ (You'll still need a pretty big drawer)
- spintin 3y agoWe now have a C64 as powerful as the Cray-1 is what you could say if you traveled back in time.
- antirez 3y agoAm I the only one that is shocked by the fact that a 1978 computer, even if a supercomputer (but still using the technology of the time) was 1/4 the speed of a Raspberry? The Pi, if you look at the big picture of computing, is a very fast computer. For comparison: you can run a 1 billion parameters LLM on a Raspberry pi at decent speed. This means that the Cray could run it, even if slowly. That's incredible.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoFind it similarly amazing, yes. > This means that the Cray could run it Gladly, we had better things to do than that :D But seriously, while we could have run it maybe speedwise, it definitely lacked the memory, not? And if one tried to train it he wouldn't be finished today. But would make a fun backwards sci-fi story imagining a time traveller that brought the 80ies an LLM from today, what would the world say and do with that slow oracle?
- samstave 3y agoMay you please do me (and others) a favor: What value does an LLM hold intrinsically. Lets say "brought an LLM from today" Does that mean just a multi gig file? What is INSIDE the LLM that would be of value? How does one speak to an LLM WRT 80's tech, and what could one glean from it.... ELI5 an LLM; BARD: https://i.imgur.com/ahRVECz.png https://i.imgur.com/ahRVECz.png OpenAI: https://i.imgur.com/Rbk5BD6.png https://i.imgur.com/Rbk5BD6.png Bing: https://i.imgur.com/zVJ1tu6.png https://i.imgur.com/zVJ1tu6.png -- So, how would one explain 80s folks what even an LLM is when we cant even ELI5 2024?
- LeoPanthera 3y agoIn a way that someone in the 80s could understand? An LLM is a very highly compressed store of knowledge combined with an advanced parser than understands questions in plain English. A consequence of the compression is that sometimes the answers lose some accuracy, which is a deliberate trade-off to make it work at all.
- dahart 3y agoAnother really fun Cray comparison: Turner Whitted (“father of ray tracing”) is rumored to have speculated some time back when he first published on ray tracing that in order to do real time ray tracing, you could put one Cray supercomputer per pixel out in the desert, each one with a single colored light, and view it from an airplane, and that would be roughly enough compute to achieve real time. A 4090 today is roughly 500,000 times faster, which means we now have achieved one Cray per pixel (!) for an 800x600 image (smaller than images today, but maybe a bit larger than the average image size in the late 70s).
- RicoElectrico 3y agoTo be honest our real-time RT works only because we're "cheating" with denoisers working in spatial and temporal domain.
- corysama 3y agoSure, to get Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K 60FPS, we cheat like hell. But, a scene from 70s ray tracing research at 800x600x24 fps on a 4090 doesn’t need to cheat much.
- ryao 3y agoDoes cyberpunk 2077’s overdrive mode remove the cheating or is it still cheating beyond the use of a denoiser?
- dahart 3y agoIn a way, yes, partly because we’re rendering typically larger images now (1080p is 4x larger than 800x600), but also because the image quality standards are very high, and because scenes are enormous compared to a pair of spheres and a checkerboard plane with a single light, because games don’t get to spend the entire frame budget on rays, and because we’re using a lot more stochastic sampling now using path tracing than what Turner Whitted did. We do get the 500,000x relative to Cray, and denoising effectively adds another x-factor on top of that, and that’s what it takes to get today’s games up to passable real time ray tracing. On the other hand, genuine real-time ray tracing without denoising has been possible for a long time for toy scenes outside of games, it all depends on what goal posts we’re talking about exactly, right?
- agumonkey 3y agoThere was a comment on .. slashdot or similar, where someone explained that the massive L0 cache of the CRAY (8MB ?) meant it could sustain it's "limited" throughput, whereas an intel quad core would peak above then plummet due to spilling.
- jecel 3y agoCray didn't believe in caches or virtual memory. He felt that data placement and movement should be 100% in the programmer's control. 8MB was the main memory, but it was made from really high speed (and super expensive!) static RAM chips instead of the dynamic RAMs most other machines used. Other machines used SRAMs for caches, so I guess you could consider the Cray 1's main memory to be a cache. The Cray had 8 "A" address registers but also 64 "B" registers. In the same way you had 8 "S" scalar registers plus 64 "T" registers. The main memory was highly interleaved so you could very quickly load and save blocks of B and T registers as well as the vector registers. You can think of B as a sort of cache for A and T as a sort of cache for S, but you had to explicitly handle this in your program.
- agumonkey 3y agoI probably distorted the original comment I read. The idea being having massive bandwidth so your processor could iterate over a very large dataset (for the era) constantly. Unlike mainstream processors, with way faster clock speeds but more bottlenecks, so for personal computing workload they were perfectly suited, but anything larger would cause performance drops. Thanks for all your informations.
- taf2 3y agoI’m pretty sure it was here that I read how cray would drive on a family trip and insist the kids stay silent while he drove and designed much the cray in his head on the drive… if anyone has a link would love to re read that story
- jtlienwis 3y agoBy the time the Cray-1 was designed, Seymour Crays children where in college. This might have applied to when he was designing the CDC 6600 when the children were younger. I know this because the Cray kids were a couple years ahead of me in high school. There are a lot of stories like this put out by John Rollwagen to build up Seymour's design creds.
- parshua 3y agoNow imagine a Beowulf cluster of those Raspberries!
- juggertao 3y ago> The first PC to reach the average Cray 1 Livermore Loops score is indicated as a 1994 100 MHz Pentium
- hn8305823 3y agoNooooo! You can't compare a Cray vector processor to a general purpose Raspberry PI! https://imgflip.com/i/8cwqf1 https://imgflip.com/i/8cwqf1 Seriously though, I think the fact that the PI is general purpose makes it even more impressive.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoSome advantages of Cray also included the fact that your purchase/commission included a cadre of support guys who would pretty much immediately show up with replacement parts and slide logic boards in/out until your system was repaired. This sort of service speaks to both the kind of modularity that we've lost with SBCs, as well as the enterprise service levels available with high-end equipment like that.
- muzamil2002 3y ago[dead]