Raspberry Pi is 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1 was in 1978

Derrick@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 192 points –
roylongbottom.org.uk

From an evaluation by Roy Longbottom, this interesting observation:

In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.

14

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

It's not clear, but I think they were referring to the version 1 Pi - the newer ones are much much much faster.

And model 1 was even cheaper (but I guess these values should be indexed on inflation anyway)

They were ~$30 if I recall correctly. Inflation isn't quite that high...

Yep.

"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 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 the Cray 1.