On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 04:26:48PM -0400, John Francis wrote: > > well, you'd know a bit about that Gateway 486-DX2/66V I had, wouldn't you?
Computer performance is by no means a scalar. Computers that do screamingly well at one thing, will be miserable for another task. And that isn't even considering things like available memory, I/O bandwidth etc. That being said, there are two graphs I'd love to see, the power of the fastest computer in the world over time, and the total compuational power available to humans over time. The second graph would have to be limited to computers that are in regular usage, and not count ones that haven't been used in over a year. Though, if I were to add the calculating power of all of my computers gathering dust, they might add up to 15% of the 9 billion OPS that my new computer can do. For that matter, my cell phone would outperform all of them put together. My hypothetical benchmark, a craymark, would be the power of the fastest computer of that year. By this graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supercomputers.png 90 GFLOPS would be a craymark of 1993. By that graph, my mac mini would have been in the top 500 computers in the world in 1993. > > (for those who don't know, Marnie got some more use out of that system > when I retired it, although I hung on to the flatbed scanner and the > big old laser printer for a few more years) > > The system that replaced it - my last desktop system - cost around $1300. > Nowadays you can get a pretty good setup for perhaps $700 to $900 or so; > while you can get cheaper systems, you're often giving up a bit too much. > > On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 05:26:23AM -0400, [email protected] wrote: > > Wow. I knew it was better and better all the time (and cheaper too, I can > > get a really computer for well below $2,000), but didn't know that about > > the Cray-1. > > > > Fascinating. Thanks, Marnie aka Doe :-) > > > > In a message dated 9/5/2013 9:25:13 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, > > [email protected] writes: > > Since that time, though, the price of each successive system has > > come down, while the amount of power has continued to climb. I'm > > not sure of the exact ratio, but just a single-threaded application > > on my notebook PC (a quad-core I7 system roughly comparable to a > > MacBook pro) delivers an order of magnitude more computation than > > a Cray-1 supercomputer. An application such as PhotoShop that can > > use all the power of the PC is better than two orders of magnitude > > faster than the Cray, while the amount of memory and storage has > > grown even faster than that! > > > > > > -- > > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > > [email protected] > > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > > follow the directions. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- Larry Colen [email protected] http://red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
