Nothing against AdaFruit, but this really should link to Roy Longbottom's detailed comparisons [1] that this very short post links to.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20Performance%20Comparisons%20With%20Home%20Computers%20Phones%20and%20Tablets.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...</a>
Another really fun Cray comparison: Turner Whitted (“father of ray tracing”) is rumored to have speculated some time back when he first published on ray tracing that in order to do real time ray tracing, you could put one Cray supercomputer per pixel out in the desert, each one with a single colored light, and view it from an airplane, and that would be roughly enough compute to achieve real time.<p>A 4090 today is roughly 500,000 times faster, which means we now have achieved one Cray per pixel (!) for an 800x600 image (smaller than images today, but maybe a bit larger than the average image size in the late 70s).
Am I the only one that is shocked by the fact that a 1978 computer, even if a supercomputer (but still using the technology of the time) was 1/4 the speed of a Raspberry? The Pi, if you look at the big picture of computing, is a very fast computer. For comparison: you can run a 1 billion parameters LLM on a Raspberry pi at decent speed. This means that the Cray could run it, even if slowly. That's incredible.
> <i>“The Raspberry Pi ... is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.”</i><p>The applications have grown as well.<p>The Cray 1 was used for mundane tasks like "<i>large-scale scientific applications, such as simulating complex physical phenomena, and was sold to government and university laboratories.</i>" [1] But the power of the Raspberry Pi allows for cutting edge computing tasks like "<i>watering plants, monitoring the birds in your yard, or for a smart doorbell!</i>" [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cray-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cray-1</a><p>[2] <a href="https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/the-7-most-common-uses-for-the-raspberry-pi-in-2023/" rel="nofollow">https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/the-7-most-common-uses-fo...</a>
I’m pretty sure it was here that I read how cray would drive on a family trip and insist the kids stay silent while he drove and designed much the cray in his head on the drive… if anyone has a link would love to re read that story
This is actually mildly surprising to me that the Raspberry Pi is only 4.5x faster. I would have bet 10-20x faster just because of how much time has passed and all the talk about: "your cellphone is 1000x faster than the Apollo computers" that I've been hearing since the time of the t-mobile sidekick.<p>I've always taken them with a grain of salt, but even if they were only an order of magnitude off, a Pi is loads faster than a sidekick. And sure the Cray is loads faster than the Apollo computers, but I wouldn't have thought it was THAT much faster.<p>I am amazed.
Some advantages of Cray also included the fact that your purchase/commission included a cadre of support guys who would pretty much immediately show up with replacement parts and slide logic boards in/out until your system was repaired. This sort of service speaks to both the kind of modularity that we've lost with SBCs, as well as the enterprise service levels available with high-end equipment like that.
There was a comment on .. slashdot or similar, where someone explained that the massive L0 cache of the CRAY (8MB ?) meant it could sustain it's "limited" throughput, whereas an intel quad core would peak above then plummet due to spilling.
Nooooo! You can't compare a Cray vector processor
to a general purpose Raspberry PI!<p><a href="https://imgflip.com/i/8cwqf1" rel="nofollow">https://imgflip.com/i/8cwqf1</a><p>Seriously though, I think the fact that the PI is general purpose makes it even more impressive.