[HN Gopher] Cray versus Raspberry Pi
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Cray versus Raspberry Pi
Author : flyingkiwi44
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-06-11 05:58 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.aardvark.co.nz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.aardvark.co.nz)
| hoppp wrote:
| The cray 1 did look futuristic like something out of star trek.
|
| It kinda reminded me of the trash can mac. I wonder if it was
| inspiration for it
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| If I ever have reason to build a Pi cluster, I'm putting in a
| Cray X-MP shaped case.
| v9v wrote:
| Related: a Pi Pico cluster that looks like a Cray computer
| https://hackaday.com/2023/04/09/parallel-computing-on-the-
| pi...
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| > It kinda reminded me of the trash can mac. I wonder if it was
| inspiration for it
|
| Ironically the trash can Mac actually looked strikingly similar
| in size and shape to actual small trash cans that were all over
| the Apple campus when I worked there. I'd see them in the
| cafeteria every day. They were aluminum though, but otherwise
| very similar. I always wondered if they had anything to do with
| the design of the computer, even if only subconsciously.
| delichon wrote:
| > but then again if you'd showed me an RPi5 back in 1977 I would
| have said "nah, impossible" so who knows?
|
| I was reading lots of scifi in 1977, so I may have tried to talk
| to the pi like Scotty trying to talk to the mouse in Star Trek
| IV. And since you can run an LLM and text to speech on an RPi5,
| it might have answered.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider'
| by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so
| futuristic.
| sublinear wrote:
| Was that point not almost a decade ago?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Not really. My 1983 Datsun would talk, but it couldn't
| converse. Alexa and Siri couldn't hold a conversation
| anywhere near the level KITT did. There's a big difference.
| With LLMs, we're getting close.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Like James Bond's Aston Martin with a satnav/tracking device
| in 1964's Goldfinger. Kids would know what that was but they
| might not understand why Bond had to continually shift some
| sort of stick to change the car's gear.
| heelix wrote:
| The self driving aspect, amazingly, is already here and
| considered mundane.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Oh really? What vehicle can I buy today, drive home, get
| twice the legal limit drunk, flop in the back alone to take
| a nap while my car drives me two hours away to a relative's
| house?
|
| I'd really like to buy that car so I await your response.
| tekla wrote:
| A Tesla is pretty close.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZfkU1QgTI
| more_corn wrote:
| Tesla is in no way close.
| ptero wrote:
| That's a jurisdiction problem, not a technology problem.
| No tech is foolproof, but even with the current
| technology someone would be much safer (for others, too)
| in the back seat than trying to drive tired, borderline
| DUI at night in unfamiliar town. Which many folks
| regularly do, for example on business travel.
|
| The reason I cannot do this today is laws, not
| technology. My 2c.
| dmd wrote:
| The only thing stopping a Waymo from doing that is laws.
| more_corn wrote:
| You can do all that in a Waymo except for the "buy" part.
| When asked about that Sergey said "why do you want to own
| a car? You have to maintain it, insure it, park it at
| home and at work. Don't you really just want to get where
| you're going and have someone else figure out the rest?"
| This was back before google ate the evil pill. Now their
| philosophy is more like "don't fall asleep, we can get a
| good deal on your kidneys, after that we'll sell your
| mom's kidneys too"
| dizhn wrote:
| Kitt was funny though. (For its time)
| Havoc wrote:
| Tried explaining what a Tamagotchi was to someone recently.
| Looks of utter bewilderment
| rahen wrote:
| No need for an RPi 5. Back in 1982, a dual or quad-CPU X-MP
| could have run a small LLM, say, with 200-300K weights, without
| trouble. The Crays were, ironically, very well suited for
| neural networks, we just didn't know it yet. Such an LLM could
| have handled grammar and code autocompletion, basic linting, or
| documentation queries and summarization. By the late 80s, a
| Y-MP might even have been enough to support a small
| conversational agent.
|
| A modest PDP-11/34 cluster with AP-120 vector coprocessors
| might even have served as a cheaper pathfinder in the late 70s
| for labs and companies who couldn't afford a Cray 1 and its
| infrastructure.
|
| But we lacked both the data and the concepts. Massive, curated
| datasets (and backpropagation!) weren't even a thing until the
| late 80s or 90s. And even then, they ran on far less powerful
| hardware than the Crays. Ideas and concepts were the limiting
| factor, not the hardware.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| > If AI systems continue to improve at the current rate and we
| combine that with improvements in hardware that are measured in
| orders of magnitude every 15 years or so then it stands to reason
| that we'll get that "super-intelligent GAI" system any day now.
|
| Oh come off it now. This could have been just a good blog post
| that didn't make me want to throw my phone across the room. GenAI
| is a hell of a drug. It's shocking how many technical
| professionals fall into the hype and become irrationally
| exuberant.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Even if you are a GAI / super intelligence booster, the
| limiting factor is clearly software and data. If it is
| possible, the big tech AI labs already have all the compute
| they need to make one deployment work. Hardware is limiting for
| deploying at scale and at a profit.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I was more about to point out that the 10x per 15 years for
| hardware hardly holds anymore for silicon and it's ridiculous
| to expect that to continue.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > it stands to reason that
|
| The upper-class "trust me bro"
| bombcar wrote:
| What happened to the programs/problems the Cray 1 solved? If
| anyone can do it on commodity hardware - is it being done? Is it
| all solved?
| criddell wrote:
| Most are not solved but modern systems can generate better
| solutions. Think about problems like forecasting weather or
| finite element analysis of mechanical systems.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| It was pretty basic models for tasks like weather forecasting
| and simulating nuclear reactions. We've come a long way on both
| the software modeling and hardware front.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| We still use a lot of the same software for nuclear reactor
| simulations. They just run a lot faster.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Work in computational fluid dynamics is limited by computing
| power. Bigger and faster computers give more accuracy and
| speed.
| whartung wrote:
| A "famous" instance was the use of a Cray to render the
| collapse of Jupiter in the movie "2010". A very early example
| of CGI in cinema.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| No. With more computing power the level of detail increased.
|
| And some problems are even more complex.
|
| My father spent his career on researching coil forms for
| Stellerator fusion reactors. Finding the shapes for their
| experiments then was a huge computational problem using then-
| state of the art machines (incl. cray for a while) and even
| today's computing power isn't there, yet.
|
| Other problems we now solve regularly on our phones ...
| benob wrote:
| Cray1 should be compared to nowadays raspberry pi pico 2 / rp2350
| which has similar specs (using external ram).
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I won't rest until the average microcontroller in an optical
| mouse is more powerful than a Cray 1.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| try as you may, but that mouse will never work as a lounge
| center piece.
| kdndnrndn wrote:
| I'm not aware of any optical mouse using a general purpose
| MCU, to my knowledge they are all using ASICs
| Rohansi wrote:
| Some gaming mice do for running RGB lights, macros, or
| whatever.
| sweetcocomoose wrote:
| Nordic dominates the market for keyboards and mice.
| Programmable MCUs with BLE radios are required for any
| wireless devices.
| qooiii2 wrote:
| A lot of touchscreens meet that requirement. Turns out it's
| often cheaper to solve problems with algorithms than avoid
| them by design.
| zouhair wrote:
| These comparisons are fun at all but a better one would be the
| difference between whatever "computer" a citizen lambda would
| have used back in the day and the cray1 and whatever on can use
| now and the current "cray" (or whatever humans use now) and see
| the difference of cost.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National
| Laboratory in 1976. That same year Gary Kildall created CP/M
| and Steve Wozniak completed the Apple-1.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I did a little poking round and I think the modern equivalent
| to old super computers is a mainframe. Modern super computers
| take up entire warehouses, cost upwards of $100 million, and
| are measured in exaflops.
|
| Cray 1 costs US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $41 million
| in 2024) (Source: Wikipedia)
|
| I have no idea what IBM z-series mainframes cost but I think it
| would be less.
|
| $41 million can buy you one or more thousands of rack-mounted
| servers and the associated networking hardware.
|
| My rough guess would be the difference in 2024 iphones to
| mainframes is an order of magnitude more between them than Cray
| and anything else on the market at the time.
|
| It's also interesting to note how much software has changed.
| The actual machine code may be less optimized, but we have
| better algorithms and we have the option of using vast amounts
| of memory and disk to save cpu time. And that's before we get
| into specialized hardware.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Mainframes aren't supercomputers. The point of a mainframe
| (anymore) is reliable transactions without downtime. They're
| not necessarily beasts at computation.
|
| Supercomputers were and are beasts of not only computation
| but memory size and bandwidth. They're used for tasks where
| the computation is highly parallel but the memory is not. If
| you're doing nuclear physics or fluid dynamics every particle
| in a simulation has _some_ influence on every other. The more
| particles and more state for each particle you can store and
| apply to every other particle makes for a more accurate
| simulation.
|
| As SCs have improved in memory size and bandwidth
| simulations/modeling with them has gotten more accurate and
| more useful.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Hardware has gone a long way...
|
| ...software... well, that's a different story.
|
| While a cray could compute millions of things and did a bunch of
| usable stuff for many groups of people who used it back then, a
| raspberrypi today has trouble even properly displaying a weather
| forecast at "acceptable speeds", because modern software has
| become very bloated, and that includes weather forecast sites
| that somehow have to include autoplaying video, usually an ad.
| lawik wrote:
| No benchmarks. Hard to take this seriously.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Reading this I wonder, say we did have a time machine and were
| somehow able to give scientists back in the day access to an
| RPI5. What sort of crazy experiments would that have spawned?
|
| I'm sure when the Cray 1 came out, access to it must have been
| very restricted and there must have been hoards of scientists
| clamoring to run their experiments and computations on it. What
| would have happened if we gave every one of those clamoring
| scientists an RPI5?
|
| And yes I know this raises an interface problem of how would they
| even use one back in the day but lets put that to the side and
| assume we figured out how to make an RPI5 behave exactly like a
| Cray 1 and allowed scientists to use it in a productive way.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Do you think they would have run experiments that have been
| missed in the meantime? Why?
| mikewarot wrote:
| First of all, how would they talk to it? You'd have to give
| them an RPI5 with serial console enabled, and strict
| instructions not to exceed the 3.3 volt limits of the I/O. Now
| it's reasonable that you could generate NTSC video out of it,
| so they could see on the screen any output.
|
| When you then explained it was just bit-banging said NTSC
| output, they'd be amazed even more.
| Havoc wrote:
| Finding more & more that power efficiency is what's driving me
| towards new gear rather than lack of horsepower.
|
| A few niche uses aside (gaming, llm) a vaguely modern desktop is
| good enough regardless of details.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Comparing against a raspberry pi 5 is kind of overkill. While a
| Pico 2 is close to computationally equivalent to a cray 1 now
| (version 2 added hardware floating point), the cray still has
| substantially more memory - almost 9MB vs 520k.
|
| For parity, you have to move up to a raspberry pi zero 2, which
| costs $15 and uses about 2W of powerm
|
| A million times cheaper than a cray in 2025 dollars and quite a
| bit more capable.
| omega3 wrote:
| Are there any details or examples of computational work the Cray
| 1 used for?
| dahart wrote:
| My former boss (Steve Parker, RIP) shared a story of Turner
| Whitted making predictions about how much compute would be needed
| to achieve real-time ray tracing, some time around when his
| seminal paper was published (~1980). As the story goes, Turner
| went through some calculations and came to the conclusion that
| it'd take 1 Cray per pixel. Because of the space each Cray takes,
| they'd be too far apart and he thought they wouldn't be able to
| link it to a monitor and get the results in real time, so instead
| you'd probably have to put the array of Crays in the desert, each
| one attached to an RGB light, and fly over it in an airplane to
| see the image.
|
| Another comparison that is equally astonishing to the RPi is that
| modern GPUs have exceeded Whitted's prediction. Turner's paper
| used 640x480 images. At that resolution, extrapolating the 160
| Mflops number, 1 Cray per pixel would be 49 Tera flops. A 4080
| GPU has just shy of 50 Tflops peak performance, so it has
| surpassed what Turner thought we'd need.
|
| Think about that - not just faster than a Cray for a lot less
| money, but one cheap consumer device is faster than 300,000
| Crays.(!) Faster than a whole Cray _per pixel_. We really have
| come a long, long way.
|
| The 5090 has over 300 Tflops of ray tracing perf, and the Tensor
| cores are now in the Petaflops range (with lower precision math),
| so we're now exceeding the compute needed for 1 Cray per pixel at
| 1080p. 1 GPU faster than 2M Crays. Mind blowing.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > 1 Cray per pixel would be 49 Tera flops. A 4080 GPU has just
| shy of 50 Tflops peak performance
|
| Interesting, wonder how it compares in terms of transistors.
| How many transistors combined did one Cray have in compute and
| cache chips?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Adjust the price of the Cray-1, for inflation, but not the power,
| for Moore's law? Need I get my napkin out for a few calculations?
| or do we just FORGET MOORE'S LAW ( that is mention no less that 4
| times, without quantification? Cray-1 (1976 ). RPi ( 2012 ). 37
| years of elapsed time. 24. 2/3 elapsed generations. 26,509,000
| times increase in power. Cray 1 160Mf. In a 26M times faster,
| would yield 4,241Gf ( 4.2Pf) , while the PI1 is capable of
| 13.5Gf, so the RPi-1 ( 2012 ) is about 0.31% of where Moore's law
| power doubling is.
|
| Now lets compare this to the top 500. ( see the point? )( do not
| speak of Moore's law, while ignoring the mathematical
| implications. ) ( and yes, 3/1000s is three thousandths ).
|
| Top 500 is 1.7 Exaflops, but by Moore's law should be 4,241Gf or
| 4.2Xf. So the top 500 is not keeping up with Moore's law.
| grubrunner666 wrote:
| This thread should be a MasterClass. Awesome reading. Seriously.
| -a gen x'er.
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