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

My wristwatch

[aglider]

Is more powerful than the Atanasoff machine!

Re:My wristwatch

[wiedzmin]

Other things that are as fast as Cray 2 supercomputer - about a million ancient PCs... but putting Apple in the title suddenly makes this news.

Re:My wristwatch

[Tuidjy]

Yeah, and my bicycle smokes any Ferrari... in miles per calorie efficiency.

The iPad2 is the second coming of Christ, we got it already.

Re:My wristwatch

[atlasdropperofworlds]

According to wikipedia, the GPU in the XBox 360 puts out 240 GFLOPS. The CPU is harder to nail down, but it seems to have a peak around 115 GFLOPS.

The iPad 3 has a CPU that, from what I hear, has a peak capacity of 1.5 GFLOPS. The SGX 543MP2 in the new iPad 3 has 4 cores and does 6.4 GFLOPS per core, per 200 MHz. If we assume the 4 cores are clocks at 600 Mhz, that would mean the GPU output would be, in theory, 77.6 GFLOPS.

In short, whatever Carmack was thinking or testing, he sure wasn't hitting the peak performance of the Xbox - the console is still leagues ahead of the mobile CPUs and GPUs, and it's 7 years old.

Obviously.

[Kaenneth]

9.80665 m/s^2

Re:Obviously.

[Bigby]

I think the Cray will have a higher terminal velocity than the iPad

My desktop computer is way more powerful than that

[Lord Lode]

Seriously.

Faster than a Cray Super computer?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What fanbois won't say about Apple!

Now, were's the "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of iPads!" jokes?

Re:Faster than a Cray Super computer?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Their stats are iPadded.

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.

Re:OMFG

[PaulUTK]

I'm not sure you actually "read one more BS Apple story", this has nothing to do with how great Apple is. This was presented by Dr. Luszczek here in my research group at the Innovative Computing Laboratory to show the efficiency of ARM vs server class CPUs and GPUs. The only readily accessible ARM we could develop on at the time was the iPad2. As with most journalism, the main point of the presentation wasn't what the title of the story was.

Re:OMFG

[adonoman]

Except that at least one of the people interviewed had the current 4S, and was still blown away by the weight, look, and performance of the identical phone handed to him. These weren't people unfamiliar with iPhones.

Re:OMFG

[pdabbadabba]

Ever wonder what percentage of people they interviewed actually made it on TV? It's hard to draw general conclusions from a handful of people saying stupid things on TV when saying that very stupid thing was required to get on television. Still: there is no doubt that those were some very stupid people.

Re:OMFG

[whisper_jeff]

Rick Mercer has gone out and talked to Americans and had many an interesting conversation. If that doesn't say something about the mindset of Americans, I don't know what does.

Here, watch the video if you'd like a sample: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7111005509913775935

See what I did there. I used a comedian's skit where he puts a camera in someone's face and airs the best reactions to make a point. Interesting that, wouldn't you say? Might even relate to the point you're trying to make.

Re:OMFG

[AcidPenguin9873]

Slide 18 from this slide deck is where you compare energy efficiency across processors. I see two major flaws in your methodology:

1. You're using the TDP of each of the processors, instead of a measured power draw while running the benchmark. Are those other processors drawing their TDPs while running this benchmark? I doubt it. Usually the TDPs for any given processor are listed for some sort of power virus type test which is difficult if not impossible to hit running real code. It's possible that this benchmark hits the TDP of each of these processors, but I'd want proof of that, and generally I'd want measured power draws, not TDPs.
2. More importantly, dynamic power scales quadratically with Voltage (P=C*V^2*F) (Wikipedia reference). If you run these processors at a slower clockspeed and lower voltage, their power draw drops by the V^2*F factor. The performance slows down because of the lower frequency, sure, but you get a squared factor by decreasing voltage, plus some power reduction due to lower frequency, while only having a linear slowdown factor due to the lower frequency. In other words, they can get into a much more efficient power band by not running at their highest voltage/highest frequency. They can run up at high voltage/high frequency because users want super-responsive computers and super-fast GPUs, but for doing long-running power efficiency comparisons, you'd never run them that way. You'd find the sweet spot on the V/F curve and run them there. Cortex-A9 is designed to live at a different point on the perf/power/V/F curve - it's effectively already down at a lower frequency/lower power/lower peak performance point, yet at its performance point it is very efficient. You'd need to sweep across a range of freq/voltages to find the sweet spot of each processor before you compare them like this.

This just In!

[Ziggitz]

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.

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.

Re:I knew the Cray-2

[ichthus]

27 or so years its senior. Wow, pretty neat, huh? Also, my Galaxy S2 is waaaaay faster than my Atari 800.

Re:I knew the Cray-2

[gander666]

When I started my Master's thesis, I began learning to program the Cray-XMP. In Fortran still, with some C (pre-ANSI C for you whippersnappers). Then I got a job, and that opportunity fell by the wayside. I still am in awe with how those machines were optimized.

Of course today, I would just use Matlab, and if I needed more speed, I would compile it to C++ and run natively. But it has been a long time since I have done any serious number crunching.

For a good read, pick up "Turing's Cathedral", it is a good story of the birth of electronic digital computers, and an eye-opener.

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.

Researcher = Jack Dongarra

[gnasher719]

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.

But... will it blend?

[cpotoso]

Will the cray2 blend as well as the ipad2?

it is so much more than that!!

[jsveiga]

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!!

Re:My desktop computer is way more powerful than t

[JohnSearle]

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.

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.