4 ms·

> way slower than your phone For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been some

by dmd 2y ago

> way slower than your phone For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second. Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.

brk 2y ago
True, but 90% of the mainframe instructions weren't tracking, telematics, data exfiltration, and user profiling. So it kinda evens out.
The_Colonel 2y ago
> Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster. Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times faster than Cray-1.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As such it was designed to push the performance envelope in a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction processing and reliability. They were substantially slower than contemporary supercomputers.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    That's true, but supercomputers are somewhat conceptually similar to GPUs, so it seems like a better comparison to illustrate technological progress. Comparing mainframes and GPUs is comparing apples and oranges.
    - zifpanachr23 2y ago
      This is a good analogy. If you look at a modern mainframe CPU it becomes pretty clear where the differences lie. Fewer, beefier cores with a lot of focus on cache. Supercomputers tend to use more conventional cores, but way more of them, and connect them in a large fabric. There's a lot more focus on parallelization and horizontal scaling. Mainframe overall compute is nowhere near a supercomputer, and you probably shouldn't be running a massive physics simulation on a mainframe, but you may get more consistency and reliability for well defined tasks.
- vaxman 2y ago
  This table will help you, but it stops way back in 2021 at 346,350 MIPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second Looking forward to the Apple A18 Pro reported to be 4GHz x2 and 2GHz x2 +/- thermal conditions.
kragen 2y ago
your phone is 5–10 billion instructions per second, a thousand times faster. it's probably a quad-core in-order arm running at 1–2 gigahertz, not 1–2 terahertz
- dmd 2y ago
  Instructions and hertz have not been equivalent for almost a quarter of a century now, though.
  - kragen 2y ago
    not equivalent, but close enough in this case; even my laptop only manages less than 2 ipc per core, and the error in your earlier comment is a factor of 1000
Taniwha 2y ago
Yes exactly, core cycle times were ~1uS so around 1Mhz clock for our old B6700
vaxman 2y ago
I think we need to put it in terms of smart watches now, soon smart rings. Hope we remaining masters can stop the delusional tech bastards running around convinced they're a new and more powerful Steve Jobs (oblivious that his success came from leveraging microprocessors to put millions of formally educated tech people with families out of work in a disorderly manner by disrupting the market) from further inflating the public stock markets (again) and distorting energy capX over AI hype. AWernerS is clearly losing the battle against them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe8Snxu3wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe8Snxu3wo

by dmd 2y ago

brk 2y ago

True, but 90% of the mainframe instructions weren't tracking, telematics, data exfiltration, and user profiling. So it kinda evens out.

The_Colonel 2y ago

> Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster. Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times faster than Cray-1.

Jtsummers 2y ago
Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As such it was designed to push the performance envelope in a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction processing and reliability. They were substantially slower than contemporary supercomputers.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  That's true, but supercomputers are somewhat conceptually similar to GPUs, so it seems like a better comparison to illustrate technological progress. Comparing mainframes and GPUs is comparing apples and oranges.
  - zifpanachr23 2y ago
    This is a good analogy. If you look at a modern mainframe CPU it becomes pretty clear where the differences lie. Fewer, beefier cores with a lot of focus on cache. Supercomputers tend to use more conventional cores, but way more of them, and connect them in a large fabric. There's a lot more focus on parallelization and horizontal scaling. Mainframe overall compute is nowhere near a supercomputer, and you probably shouldn't be running a massive physics simulation on a mainframe, but you may get more consistency and reliability for well defined tasks.
vaxman 2y ago
This table will help you, but it stops way back in 2021 at 346,350 MIPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second Looking forward to the Apple A18 Pro reported to be 4GHz x2 and 2GHz x2 +/- thermal conditions.

kragen 2y ago

your phone is 5–10 billion instructions per second, a thousand times faster. it's probably a quad-core in-order arm running at 1–2 gigahertz, not 1–2 terahertz

dmd 2y ago
Instructions and hertz have not been equivalent for almost a quarter of a century now, though.
- kragen 2y ago
  not equivalent, but close enough in this case; even my laptop only manages less than 2 ipc per core, and the error in your earlier comment is a factor of 1000

Taniwha 2y ago

Yes exactly, core cycle times were ~1uS so around 1Mhz clock for our old B6700

vaxman 2y ago

I think we need to put it in terms of smart watches now, soon smart rings. Hope we remaining masters can stop the delusional tech bastards running around convinced they're a new and more powerful Steve Jobs (oblivious that his success came from leveraging microprocessors to put millions of formally educated tech people with families out of work in a disorderly manner by disrupting the market) from further inflating the public stock markets (again) and distorting energy capX over AI hype. AWernerS is clearly losing the battle against them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe8Snxu3wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe8Snxu3wo