Top all-time · #2708
Roy Longbottom
Personal blog · roylongbottom.org.ukhardwaresystems
Roy Longbottom's personal blog at roylongbottom.org.uk covers hardware and systems. Since 2016, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
The PC benchmark collection is a FREE set of programs that measure performance of CPUs, cache, memory, disks and graphics. They run via Windows, Linux and, now, Android phones and tablets, Raspberry Pi.
Most-linked posts?
- Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-12-25
- The Fortran Whetstone programs were the first general-purpose benchmarks4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-03-10
- Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons with Home Computers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-19
What Hacker News says?
DirectDraw did support hardware accelerated blitter, and speedup was quite significant. http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/directdraw%20results.htm Even the oldest S3 VLB cards performed 8 bit copies 3-4x faster than CPU. Pretty much every VGA chipset from around 1993-94 onward had 2D accelerator, most popular were IBM 8514 derived like from S3 or ATI.
Comment linking /directdraw%20results.htm
on “Original Age of Empires 2 dev talks about its usage of assembly code”Submitted Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi as a story · 360 points
HN discussionRecognizing the domain, you can read about the early history of benchmarks: http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm
Comment linking /whetstone.htm
on “Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi”Submitted The Fortran Whetstone programs were the first general-purpose benchmarks as a story · 18 points
HN discussionThe STM32 family is awesome! There's nothing wrong with it as a target! But, basically, by trying to use Uxn on most STM32s you're turning a Pentium-133 into a 386-40, with a corresponding reduction in the kind of functionality you can deliver. Also, you have to write all your software in assembly language. The most popular model of STM32 is probably the STM32F103C8T6 https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microproc…
Comment linking /Raspberry%20Pi%20Benchmarks.htm
on “Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world”Submitted Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons with Home Computers as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIndeed. I find it interesting to look at the generational outliers on that curve: The Cray-1 wasn’t eclipsed in raw FP compute by a consumer system until the Pentium more than 15 years later. http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM”> It just wouldn't have worked any earlier than when the results started coming out. It most certainly would. Not in the 50's, of course, but in the 60's and 70's. http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm Look at the MFLOPS columns. It seems to me that we had to wait until decent memory sizes and decent fp performance was a lot cheaper and therefore much more accessible => much easier to do experiments without…
Comment linking /whetstone.htm
on “John Michell: Country Parson Described Black Holes in 1783 (2000)”"1/4 the speed of a Pi" applies to the original (slow) 2012 Pi which is unable to run LLM as fast as you think. However the 2020 Pi 400 (equivalent to Pi 4), which can run the LLM workload, is about 100 times faster than the Cray 1: " Raspberry Pi ARM CPUs - The comment above was for the 2012 Pi 1. In 2020, the Pi 400 average Livermore Loops, Linpack and Whetstone MFLOPS reached 78.8, 49.5 and 95.5 times faster than…
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “Comparing the 1970's Cray-1 supercomputer against the Raspberry Pi”The article mentions "See Longbottom’s extensive tests and comparisons article here." and [1]. This was already mentioned in a snapshot of 18 Jan 2024 [2] so it wasn't added after your criticism. [1] http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P... [2] https://archive.is/a99i3
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “Comparing the 1970's Cray-1 supercomputer against the Raspberry Pi”Specifically, the Raspberry Pi section at http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “Comparing the 1970's Cray-1 supercomputer against the Raspberry Pi”Nothing against AdaFruit, but this really should link to Roy Longbottom's detailed comparisons [1] that this very short post links to. [1] http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “Comparing the 1970's Cray-1 supercomputer against the Raspberry Pi”It would likely take a few more... but for some history fun: https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2003/11/ #3 on the list was "X" https://www.top500.org/system/173225/ Virginia Tech, self made 2,200 core PowerPC 970 as 1100 G5 Macs with Rmax at 10,280.00 GFlops (this is 0.012 PFlops). ... and for some more history about the Cray vs modern computers... http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P... “I…
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “A Cray-1 supercomputer replica from 30 "obsolete" Mac Minis”tcl 8.6.13 still has serious performance problems, although indeed 8.0 did improve the situation dramatically; it's on the order of 64× slower than native code in simple microbenchmarks like http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/dumbfib.tcl , which also means about 2× slower than cpython. its type system is a big part of the reason why compare†: : ~; time tclsh <<<'proc fib {n} { if {$n < 2} {return 1} else {return […
Comment linking /dhrystone%20results.htm
on “GUI Examples – Rye Language”It's worth reading John Mashey's post on why the VAX was displaced by RISC: https://yarchive.net/comp/vax.html Basically, making VAXen go faster was too much work, so they fell farther and farther behind, and they were already behind MIPS on performance in 01988. Mashey was at MIPS at the time and tells his recollections of how DEC started buying MIPS chips to build DECstations around. The 11/750 came out in October…
Comment linking /Raspberry%20Pi%20Benchmarks.htm
on “The Passing of Ucbvax (1994)”Just now I was trying to find a microcontroller that would match the performance of the original Cray 1. But of course, it's complicated. Throughout of various floating point operations can vary by a factor of 100 on a simple machine. Which is why the standard benchmarks perform a combination of typical calculations. There's the "Gibson Mix" abd "Livermore Loops". Roy Longbottom is perhaps the most comprehensive com…
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers”Another couple of machines from 1977 [1]: Cromemco Z-2: 8-bit Z80 @ 4 MHz, maximum 256 kB RAM (bank-switched in a 64 kB address space), 0.007 Whetstone MIPS - $4695 VAX-11/780: 32-bit VAX @ 5 MHz, maximum 8 MB RAM, 0.476 Whetstone MIPS - $241,255 In a similar same format (benchmark from [2]): IBM 3033: ?-bit ? @ 17 MHz, maximum 8 MB RAM, 4.70 Whetstone MIPS - $70,400/mo! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2295…
Comment linking /whetstone.htm
on “A Guide to the IBM 3033 Processor Complex (1979) [pdf]”"Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets": http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P... (www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm)
Comment linking /Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm
on “Google's Pixel 10 can now run Linux apps better than other Android phones”
