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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.

6 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Things like this... by Pojut · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...make me kinda sad. On the one hand, I LOVE when I was born (1984). I'm old enough to remember a time without the Internet, without a PC in every home, and when cell phones were the size of briefcases...yet I'm still young enough to take advantage of technological innovations, keep up with advances, and appreciate the impact it has on our lives.

    On the other hand, I wonder how much amazing stuff I would see had I been born even just 20 years later. In my lifetime I have already watched (for example) the NES as a state of the art system turn into the average gaming PC having a video card capable of over 1 teraflop worth of processing power. How much extra innovation and advancement would I see if I had STARTED with those 1+ teraflop cards?

    "Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." -Kay

    --
    Living With a Nerd
  2. 1979 tech still wins by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    "The Cray-1 had 12 pipelined functional units" and had "floating point performance generally about 136 MFLOPS. However, by using vector instructiosn carefully and building useful chains, the system could peak at 250 MFLOPS."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1

    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.

  3. Re:Clearly, they would be much more impressed... by blair1q · · Score: 5, Funny

    If I had a time machine, I'd go into the future, find the future self of my time machine, disassemble it, put it in my time machine, bring it back to the present, reassemble it, then I'd have two time machines.

    I'd never have to buy parts again.

  4. Ridiculous Comparison by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Cray's approach to supercomputing wasn't just to make the CPU fast. Indeed, he outcompeted faster CPUs by making all of his computers fast, so no power in the machine was wasted waiting for something else. Especially IO and memory were his focus for throughput. A Droid's CPU is bottlenecked by the rest of the device.

    This unfair comparison isn't just whining about missing Cray's point. There's a lot of power in that Droid that the SW can't exploit, because its bottlenecks leave the fast parts waiting. Not only does that slow them down, but it wastes electrical energy. Which is the biggest problem in mobile devices.

    LINPACK isn't the best way to measure supercomputers, and "nanocomputers" like mobile phones could be better if they learned something from Cray's research 40 years ago.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  5. 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!