Comment by twoodfin
2 days ago
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance.
That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
Seymour Cray never designed a silicon microprocessor. I wonder what he would have created had that opportunity presented itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray
In his memory some have said his name are the last two characters in RISC and CISC.
I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is?
Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s!
Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
At the risk of sounding cliche i'll point out that ios probably uses several times the capacity of a cray 1 just to get the keyboard to work.
Yes, but the impressive part is that the iPhone does it on a few mW instead of a few MW
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Recently I've found myself wanting a tricorder type device.
With the visual analysis of LLMs, throw in some extra ingredients with a camera, microphone, speaker, and display, and were getting close. Add Bluetooth for biosensors and... Iterate a couple of generations...
We're getting there!
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From the Wikipedia article on the Cray 1:
"The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance
...
By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."
These flops are not the same. The 2013 phone flops are fp32, the A13 flops look to be fp32 as well (not entirely sure), while the Cray numbers (like the rest of the HPC industry) are fp64 (Cray 1 predates what would become IEEE 754 binary64 though, so not same exact arithmetic but similar in dynamic range and precision).
A modern Nvidia GB200 only does about 40 tflop/s in fp64 for instance. You can emulate higher precision/dynamic range arithmetic with multiple passes and manipulations of lower precision/dynamic range arithmetic but without an insane number of instructions it won't meet all the IEEE 754 guarantees for instance.
Certainly if Nvidia wanted to dedicate much more chip area to fp64 they could get a lot higher, but fp64 FMA units alone would be likely >30 times larger than their fp16 cousins and probably 100s of times larger than fp4 versions.
> while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[
Sustained ? Or just for some ms when the thermals kick in ?
>how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is..
Sadly most of that power is not working for you, most of the time, but working against you, by spying, tracking and manipulating you.
Bet that was not include in your sci-fi dreams in 70s..
Oh but we had The Forbin Project, its sequel Colossus, and later Wargames. Not to mention Star Trek episodes with malignant computers. And I have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
In the 70s, science fiction fed me Cold War fears of world-controlling mainframes.
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I'd love to see you substantiate that - bet you can't.
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Not terribly impressive considering an average 20 year old super computer c. 2005 is still about 100x as fast as today's best consumer cpus
Well, yeah, Dennard scaling ended around 20 years ago!
> The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX ...
You'd need a different comparison to show how the Cray-1 was special. If the comparison is to single commodity CPUs, like the Pentium MMX, you could make much the same comparison for many mainframes and supercomputers. Several supercomputers in the 1980s exceeded 1 GFLOP, for example, and it wasn't until the 2000s that you could get commodity CPUs with that performance.