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Apple iPad 2 As Fast As the Cray-2 Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on from the great-I'll-take-a-dozen dept.

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."

9 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Obviously. by Kaenneth · · Score: 5, Funny

    9.80665 m/s^2

    1. Re:Obviously. by Bigby · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. OMFG by MogNuts · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

    1. Re:OMFG by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    2. Re:OMFG by PaulUTK · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  3. This just In! by Ziggitz · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  4. I knew the Cray-2 by mikew03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:My wristwatch by wiedzmin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Bow before me, for I am root.
  6. Re:My wristwatch by atlasdropperofworlds · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.