Apple iPad 2 As Fast As the Cray-2 Supercomputer 231
An anonymous reader writes "Presenting at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference, a researcher from the University of Tennessee presented evidence that the iPad 2 is as fast as the original Cray-2 supercomputer. Performance improvements were made to the iPad 2 LINPACK software by writing Python for generating and testing various Assembly routines. The researcher also found that the ARM Cortex-A9 easily beats the NVIDIA/AMD GPUs and latest Intel/AMD workstation CPUs in performance-per-Watt efficiency."
OMFG (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh my god. If I have to read one more BS Apple story like this on the internet, I'm going to go nuts.
Apple lovers must be stopped. They're driving ad revenue and hits to all these *retarded* articles. They keep writing them because people keep clicking on them. STOP IT people!
Maybe I should just follow "if u can't beat em, join em." I should just post "Using an iPhone gives you crabs" or "iPhone as valuable as cream of wheat" and watch the money roll in.
I just laugh. Remember that new screw hoax? They said "they just make it too easy."
I knew the Cray-2 (Score:5, Interesting)
I was privileged to program on the Cray-2 back in the day. It was an awesome machine if you had the right kinds of problems for it to solve. My hat is off to the company who let me use the fastest computer in the world for my vi sessions :). That said it;s hardly surprising that the march of Moore's law has resulted in an iPad today beating a computer 13 or so years its senior.
What the headline giveth . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
. . . the article taketh away.
From the Phoronix article: "When benchmarking the Apple iPad 2, the University of Tennessee employee achieved 4 GFLOPS per Watt on the ARM SoC (measured at the chip level)."
The linked graphs don't have units on them, so I have to assume until proven otherwise that the article is correct. But performance per watt, while a valid comparison, doesn't equate to "faster than a Cray-2" in the sense I read the headline, since I assume the Cray-2 pulled quite a bit more power than the iPad. To be "faster than a Cray-2", you really would need a Beowulf cluster of iPad processors.
Re:OMFG (Score:5, Interesting)
I just laugh. Remember that new screw hoax? They said "they just make it too easy."
Jimmy Kimmel recently went out on the street [hollywoodreporter.com] with an iPhone 4S and passed it off as the new iPhone 5 and asked people what they thought of it. Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S. If that doesn't say something about the mindset of Apple's userbase, I don't know what does.
Re:OMFG (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh my god. If I have to read one more BS Apple story like this on the internet, I'm going to go nuts
Oh my god. If I have to read one more utterly ignorant post that completely misses the point of the article, I'm ... well, sadly, it's going to happen because twits like you are everywhere of late...
Others have already pointed out - the article is about ARM. It just happened to be an iPad 2 that was used in the testing.
Re:My wristwatch (Score:3, Interesting)
Your R is not C. Carmack put the iPad 2 at roughly half the performance of the 360 [techdigest.tv], which puts the "Retina iPad" right in the ballpark of the 360, although with twice the working RAM.
Re:remember the i486? whips the Cray-1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh - you mean like every JVM/CLR in the last I can't remember how long? Like you get in every Android [blogspot.com] device? Like all the decent JS engines out there?
Now we could discuss the relative efficiencies of interpreted vs bytecode vs compiled vs whatever all day long (hint: it's more variable [tirania.org] than it might at first seem), but I have a feeling you'd rather go back out and shout at the kids on your lawn.
Re:Obviously. (Score:2, Interesting)
[nerd mode]
You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Terminal velocity is the point at which an object moving through a fluid (typically, air, though other fluids are also applicable) is experiencing no net acceleration - that is, the force propelling it is equal (and opposite) to the force of drag acting on the object as it moves through the fluid.
It's not directly a function of the mass of the object, but the mass of the object certainly has an effect, because the force exerted by gravity is larger on larger masses - f=ma, remember. This means to that two identically-shaped objects dropped from the same height through the same fluid, but constructed of different materials so they had different masses, would have different terminal velocity - Imagine I drop a 1 cubic meter block of cork, and a 1 cubic meter block of cement. The cork would have a much lower terminal velocity, because it has less mass, even though it's volume would be the same as the cubic meter block of cement.
If it "had more kinetic energy," that means it has "more force" (f = ma, remember?), which means, all other things being equal, the higher-mass object would have a higher terminal velocity, higher kinetic energy, thus more force transmitted to the surface it strikes on impact.
Seriously, if you're going to hang around on Slashdot, please at least try to understand basic mechanics, will you?
[/nerd mode]