7 ms·

I ran some numerical simulations on my Raspberry Pi and on my laptop. With the LCD on, my laptop used 20.4 watt seconds to do the calculation and the RPi used 1

I ran some numerical simulations on my Raspberry Pi and on my laptop. With the LCD on, my laptop used 20.4 watt seconds to do the calculation and the RPi used 17.1 watt seconds. The RPi drew 3 watts and my laptop drew about 60 watts. I think, even with my screen on, that my laptop would be more efficient if I had used 2 cores instead of 1 in the calculation (or if I had just turned off the LCD). My conclusion, the RPi doesn't even win in FLOPS/Watt let alone $/FLOPS.

anthonyb 14y ago
Does it have to? It sounds like they're using this as a learning platform rather than a serious $/FLOP/Watt cluster. In that case you'd want to make it easy to get funding, and be optimising for initial cost. What would be the cost of 64 of your laptops?
- montecarl 14y ago
  It certainly doesn't have to! I just wanted to share the results of an experiment I did with numerical computing on the RPi. Certainly laptops aren't the idea platform to compare against anyways. I'd compare to a 1u node that you would buy for compute cluster. One can by a 64 core 1u node with 64 GB of ram for about $7k. If one wants to play around with cluster computing you can emulate an entire cluster using one of those!
fhars 14y ago
Of course that may (or may not) change if the RPi foundation will be able to get the programming documentation for the DSP/GPU part of the processor a recent blog post hinted at.
gaius 14y ago
Well you are missing the point a bit: the RPi's mission is to be an accessible platform for teaching kids to code on. It's role as a toy for former-80s-8-bit-geeks is secondary.
darklajid 14y ago
That might matter for a cluster, but that's (obviously) not the target market for a Pi. If you only have less than $100 to spend, a better $/FLOPS ratio of a MacBook (or anything else, really) doesn't matter. One is available, one is plainly not. For people that CAN spend enough this usually is just a (third? nth?) gadget to play with. Like in the article (because, it's really just a neat way of playing with gadgets and lego, not 'useful' in any sense that can be quantified).

anthonyb 14y ago

Does it have to? It sounds like they're using this as a learning platform rather than a serious $/FLOP/Watt cluster. In that case you'd want to make it easy to get funding, and be optimising for initial cost. What would be the cost of 64 of your laptops?

montecarl 14y ago
It certainly doesn't have to! I just wanted to share the results of an experiment I did with numerical computing on the RPi. Certainly laptops aren't the idea platform to compare against anyways. I'd compare to a 1u node that you would buy for compute cluster. One can by a 64 core 1u node with 64 GB of ram for about $7k. If one wants to play around with cluster computing you can emulate an entire cluster using one of those!

fhars 14y ago

Of course that may (or may not) change if the RPi foundation will be able to get the programming documentation for the DSP/GPU part of the processor a recent blog post hinted at.

gaius 14y ago

Well you are missing the point a bit: the RPi's mission is to be an accessible platform for teaching kids to code on. It's role as a toy for former-80s-8-bit-geeks is secondary.

darklajid 14y ago

That might matter for a cluster, but that's (obviously) not the target market for a Pi. If you only have less than $100 to spend, a better $/FLOPS ratio of a MacBook (or anything else, really) doesn't matter. One is available, one is plainly not. For people that CAN spend enough this usually is just a (third? nth?) gadget to play with. Like in the article (because, it's really just a neat way of playing with gadgets and lego, not 'useful' in any sense that can be quantified).