Apple iPad 2 As Fast As the Cray-2 Supercomputer

An anonymous reader writes "Presenting at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference, a researcher from the University of Tennessee presented evidence that the iPad 2 is as fast as the original Cray-2 supercomputer. Performance improvements were made to the iPad 2 LINPACK software by writing Python for generating and testing various Assembly routines. The researcher also found that the ARM Cortex-A9 easily beats the NVIDIA/AMD GPUs and latest Intel/AMD workstation CPUs in performance-per-Watt efficiency."

Comments

OMFG

[MogNuts]

Oh my god. If I have to read one more BS Apple story like this on the internet, I'm going to go nuts.

Apple lovers must be stopped. They're driving ad revenue and hits to all these *retarded* articles. They keep writing them because people keep clicking on them. STOP IT people!

Maybe I should just follow "if u can't beat em, join em." I should just post "Using an iPhone gives you crabs" or "iPhone as valuable as cream of wheat" and watch the money roll in.

I just laugh. Remember that new screw hoax? They said "they just make it too easy."

Re:OMFG

[girlintraining]

I just laugh. Remember that new screw hoax? They said "they just make it too easy."

Jimmy Kimmel recently went out on the street with an iPhone 4S and passed it off as the new iPhone 5 and asked people what they thought of it. Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S. If that doesn't say something about the mindset of Apple's userbase, I don't know what does.

I knew the Cray-2

[mikew03]

I was privileged to program on the Cray-2 back in the day. It was an awesome machine if you had the right kinds of problems for it to solve. My hat is off to the company who let me use the fastest computer in the world for my vi sessions :). That said it;s hardly surprising that the march of Moore's law has resulted in an iPad today beating a computer 13 or so years its senior.

What the headline giveth . . .

[Rob the Bold]

. . . the article taketh away.

From the Phoronix article: "When benchmarking the Apple iPad 2, the University of Tennessee employee achieved 4 GFLOPS per Watt on the ARM SoC (measured at the chip level)."

The linked graphs don't have units on them, so I have to assume until proven otherwise that the article is correct. But performance per watt, while a valid comparison, doesn't equate to "faster than a Cray-2" in the sense I read the headline, since I assume the Cray-2 pulled quite a bit more power than the iPad. To be "faster than a Cray-2", you really would need a Beowulf cluster of iPad processors.

Re:remember the i486? whips the Cray-1

[radish]

automatically in the compiler, try several things and pick the one that uses the least memory/processor cycles/OSPF if multithreaded/whatever based on what you want to gain by optimizing code

Oh - you mean like every JVM/CLR in the last I can't remember how long? Like you get in every Android device? Like all the decent JS engines out there?

Now we could discuss the relative efficiencies of interpreted vs bytecode vs compiled vs whatever all day long (hint: it's more variable than it might at first seem), but I have a feeling you'd rather go back out and shout at the kids on your lawn.