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In the year 2000, a M1 MacBook Air would have been the world's fastest supercomputer (or second fastest if you had the base model with the 7-core GPU). https:/
by duskwuff 7mo ago
In the year 2000, a M1 MacBook Air would have been the world's fastest supercomputer (or second fastest if you had the base model with the 7-core GPU).
https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2000/06/ https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2000/06/
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.503610.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Sp...
- tgma 7mo agoImpressive, of course; but not quite that impressive. Only true if all you're running is matmul (supercomputer has general purpose CPUs so more flexible than M1 GPU) - also those flops are probably FP64 in supercomputer ratings and FP32 in M1. As a smart man I knew used to say, supercomputers are about I/O not raw compute. Those have terabytes of RAM not 8GB.
- reverius42 7mo agoI do wonder, how fast is the RAM on a 2000 era supercomputer vs. the disk on a 2026 MacBook Pro?
- tgma 7mo agoYour question hits directly at latency vs. throughput distinction. Depends on which you mean by "fast." Throughput-wise, the supercomputer is competitive because it has a lot of local RAM connected to lots of independent nodes, which, in aggregate, is comparable to modern laptop's RAM throughput (still much more than disk) with a caveat, that you can only leverage the supercomputer bandwidth if your workload is embarrassingly parallel running on all nodes[1]. Latency-wise, old RAM still beats NVMe by two or three orders of magnitude. [1]: there's another advantage that supercomputer has which is lots more of local SRAM caches. If the workload is parallel and can benefit from cache locality, it blows away the modern microprocessor.