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Mobile Phones vs. Supercomputers of the Past

Posted by timothy on from the crays-are-pure-sculpture dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The recently published Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is based on the Linpack benchmark developed decades ago by Jack Dongarra. This same test has been ported to Android mobile phones, which means that we can compare the performance of our phones against that of the supercomputers of the past. For example, a tweaked Motorola Droid can hit 52 Mflop/s, which is more than 15 times faster than the CPUs used in the 1979 Cray-1." But even today's most powerful cellphones don't come with an integrated bench.

2 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Re:1979 tech still wins by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ah but all work on the Cray-1 was programed to be as parallel as possible, so cpu to cpu isn't an appropriate comparison. Much more useful is device output, in which case the 136 MFLOPS is significantly better performance than the 52 MFLOPS.

    That is of course not considering that the designers of the Java applet that runs the benchmark admit that you're moreso benchmarking the java effeciency of a given device with their app than the full performance of the device.

    Well, also not considering the $6m to $8m price tag of the Cray-1 vs the $200 (after rebate and 2 year plan) price tag of the Droid. Even factoring in inflation, I think my droid wins the performance-per-dollar crown by a little bit.

    It does mean though that the intial statement "15 times faster than the cpus in the cray-1" is not quite reality. more like 5 times faster.

  2. Cray did Last Starfighter, iPhone/Android better by MauiMaker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Back in 1983, I worked at Digital Productions where we had one of the very few commercially owned Cray (X-MP) computers. We were doing 'proper work' of making some of the earliest CGI for film and advertising. There was a bit of film before (Tron, Westworld, Looker, JPL stuff, etc) but The Last Starfighter was the first major film to use CGI exclusively for its spaceships, etc. in flying sequences. (Robert Preston drove a mockup car for ground scenes.) Each minute of film took (on rough avg) an hour of CPU time. All the rendering code was written in FORTRAN and ran on the Cray, outputting to film on a custom digital film printer.

    Today, the games you can play on your iPhone/Android or even the aging Nintendo DS have better graphics!! Resolution is a lot lower (not 3000x5000!) but at the screen size it certainly looks much better - and rendered in real time!