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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."
Is more powerful than the Atanasoff machine!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
9.80665 m/s^2
Seriously.
What fanbois won't say about Apple!
Now, were's the "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of iPads!" jokes?
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."
Newer smaller computer is faster than older larger computer! Some didn't think it possible, one of those people submitted the article under the false impression that anyone gave a fuck.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
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.
It was obvious by the Cray 2 / iPad 2 comparison that this is BS.
. . . 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.
I am not a crackpot.
who has been publishing the Top 500 Supercomputer list for many, many years. I would bet that he ran Linpack himself on the Cray-2.
Decades of Moore's law and clever mniaturization lead us to freaking hipster filtering JPEG crap on Instagram, faster. Slow clap.
Will the cray2 blend as well as the ipad2?
I would hope we had advanced since then. The point of this 'revelation' was what? Click ad revenue generation?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It has been demonstrated that the ipad 2 is lighter than an Apple II.
The ipad 2 user interface has been tested and proven much better than the Zilog Z80's.
On a blind test, the ipad's screen resolution has been voted subjectively better than the MSX's!
And an independent research confirmed that it has more available apps than the HP41C!
In a random test with a control group, 3 out of 5 teenagers prefer the ipad when offered the option of an ipad or a Newton, and 2 out of 4 girls prefer the ipad over Justin "Beaver".
Oh my God, the ipad is really the best thing in the whole universe! No, it has been demonstrated that it is better than 5 universes put together with whipped cream and strawberries on top!!
This far in, and still no comments about a Beowulf Cluster of iPads.
What has Slashdot become?
#DeleteChrome
All these great things that have been done on a Cray now equal the numbing stupidity of things like Facebook on an iPad?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
s this LINPACK metric something that exercises the Crey's massive pipeline architecture, where huge arrays of numbers (the vectors) were operated on at lightning speed through pipeline (assembly line-style) chip design? Or is it just a looping test?
Now that's a stupid question
... if dropped on your foot.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
you need to remember, however, that the software for these consumer devices is nowhere close to that on the Crays. no optimization is done any more... for you script kiddies, "optimization" means you manually with the assembly language, or 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. all this "include.kitchensink" stuff just packs in extra code crap in case any of it is needed.
and Clippy or Bob never ran on a Cray, either.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That's true for desktops maybe.
For servers performance per watt is probably much more important. 1000 xeons, 10,000 a9s - what difference does it make? Once my stuff is parallelized, it doesn't really matter if it executes on 1000 cores or 10k cores. I don't know how all the expenses break down - power usage is one component, but so is the number of physical components, space taken up, etc.
It comes down to what's cheaper, and the type of application. But I think it's wrong to dismiss ARM as slow. It doesn't make sense to compare one ARM processor to one Intel/AMD processor.
That's not truly. Applying Amdahl's law, there's a lower limit in regards to the speedups you can achieve. To use an analogy, regardless of how many women are available, you're not really going to a new baby in less than 9 months. Even if your web server can handle 1 million requests in parallel, if each request will take a second to complete, that may be unacceptable. So if you have to hit certain latency requirements, then complaining about the ARM processors as being slow is perfectly valid.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Guess what? Computing power has increased exponentially in the last three decades. If this surprises you you're an idiot. I mean, ten years ago I paid $2,000 for a Toshiba laptop with a whopping 1 GB of RAM and a 20G hard disk; now I can get a Tracfone with better specs than that.
Slashdot sure seems to have its collective mouth wrapped tightly around the iSchlong lately.
And in other news, the Asus Transformer Prime is 4x as fast as the Cray. Android (NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30 1300 MHz (4 cores) ) vs Apple (Apple A5 (32nm) 1000 MHz (2 cores) )
I hate how everything must be compared against Apple iProducts. I don't recall every comparisons of yesteryear being brand specific. I don't care if the iPhoneX is 2x as fast as iPhoneX-1, or the iProductY is 2x as fast as the Cray. Give me damn benchmarks or clock speed of current day standards, and not a commercial.
I mean, a guy with a camera crew shows up and hands you an object and says it is "X" and asks for thoughts. Are you going to disbelieve it's what they say it is??
Sure I'll probably believe its what they say it is, but that's not the really the point. Lets assume I beleive its an iphone 5:
On the one hand If I already have a 4S in my own pocket, then I'm probably not going to gush about how this "5" is lighter than the one in my pocket. Nor gush about how much faster it is. Nor gush about how much thinner it is etc. Because it isn't.
On the other hand if they hand me a 4S calling it a 5 and I am not particularly familiar with a 4S, then I might cheerfully say any number of complimentary things about it. But I wouldn't use relative adjectives like "lighter" or "faster" or "thinner" ... I would just remark that its very "light" or "fast" or "thin".
But in what universe would I say its faster, lighter, and thinner than a 4S unless I already had a 4S to form some sort of basis for making those comparisons... and if I already had a 4S why on earth would I think an identical object is faster, lighter, and thinner?
You give them something that they assume is faster, lighter, and thinner than the 4S they currently have, and they'll agree that it is despite their own senses not beign able to tell them apart.
The emperor has no clothes, but we assume he can't possibly be naked and therefore compliment his new suit our own eyes tell us doesn't exist.
Otherwise referred to as "Link Bait"!!
Maybe, in order to make news relevant to readers, they chose to compare to something most readers are familiar with? That's pretty much the point of analogies and comparisons.
Why do you think we ever talked about storage in terms of "Libraries of Congress" in the first place?
> Give me damn benchmarks or clock speed of
> current day standards, and not a commercial.
RTMFA! It has numbers. OF COURSE the summary has the appealing bits. Welcome to journalism. Welcome to the Internet. Welcome to the human species.
More info from a year ago: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/the-ipad-in-your-hand-as-fast-as-a-supercomputer-of-yore/
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.