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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."
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Apple iPad 2 As Fast As the Cray-2 Supercomputer

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  • My wristwatch (Score:4, Informative)

    by aglider ( 2435074 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:01PM (#41367305) Homepage

    Is more powerful than the Atanasoff machine [wikipedia.org]!

    • Re:My wristwatch (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wiedzmin ( 1269816 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:39PM (#41367785)

      Other things that are as fast as Cray 2 supercomputer - about a million ancient PCs... but putting Apple in the title suddenly makes this news.

      • you need to remember, however, that the software for these consumer devices is nowhere close to that on the Crays. no optimization is done any more... for you script kiddies, "optimization" means you manually with the assembly language, or automatically in the compiler, try several things and pick the one that uses the least memory/processor cycles/OSPF if multithreaded/whatever based on what you want to gain by optimizing code. all this "include.kitchensink" stuff just packs in extra code crap in case an

        • by radish ( 98371 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @10:48PM (#41370673) Homepage

          automatically in the compiler, try several things and pick the one that uses the least memory/processor cycles/OSPF if multithreaded/whatever based on what you want to gain by optimizing code

          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.

      • by hazydave ( 96747 )

        The Samsung Galaxy SIII is faster than four Cray Y-MPs (or a couple of billion HP45 calculators)... at least if you're not too particularly about how your GFLOPS are served up. It's also got memory, unless you upgraded to the Y-MP M90. And uses quite a bit less power. That's 24 years for ya!

        Nothing particularly useful or interesting about such observations, I suppose, unless you put the name "Apple" in the title. Or maybe just an Apple fan's way of dealing with the iPad 2 not being a terribly fast device, a

  • Obviously. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kaenneth ( 82978 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:03PM (#41367325) Journal

    9.80665 m/s^2

    • 9.80665 m/s^2

      I think yours is a case of normal gravity.
      Thus no doctor is needed.

    • by Bigby ( 659157 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:11PM (#41367465)

      I think the Cray will have a higher terminal velocity than the iPad

      • I think the Cray will have a higher terminal velocity than the iPad

        Now that's a race I want to see.

      • Nah, I bet the Cray wins. The iPad is probably both denser *and* more aerodynamic.

        "Cray Outperforms iPad in Crucial Terminal Speed Tests"

  • by Lord Lode ( 1290856 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:06PM (#41367387)

    Seriously.

    • by JohnSearle ( 923936 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @07:21PM (#41369057)

      And in other news, the Asus Transformer Prime is 4x as fast as the Cray. Android (NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30 1300 MHz (4 cores) ) [primatelabs.com] vs Apple (Apple A5 (32nm) 1000 MHz (2 cores) ) [primatelabs.com]

      I hate how everything must be compared against Apple iProducts. I don't recall every comparisons of yesteryear being brand specific. I don't care if the iPhoneX is 2x as fast as iPhoneX-1, or the iProductY is 2x as fast as the Cray. Give me damn benchmarks or clock speed of current day standards, and not a commercial.

      • by sootman ( 158191 )

        Maybe, in order to make news relevant to readers, they chose to compare to something most readers are familiar with? That's pretty much the point of analogies and comparisons.

        Why do you think we ever talked about storage in terms of "Libraries of Congress" in the first place?

        > Give me damn benchmarks or clock speed of
        > current day standards, and not a commercial.

        RTMFA! It has numbers. OF COURSE the summary has the appealing bits. Welcome to journalism. Welcome to the Internet. Welcome to the human spe

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:06PM (#41367389)

    What fanbois won't say about Apple!

    Now, were's the "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of iPads!" jokes?

  • OMFG (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MogNuts ( 97512 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:07PM (#41367401)

    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."

    • Re:OMFG (Score:5, Interesting)

      by girlintraining ( 1395911 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:17PM (#41367541)

      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Well, you could basically do that with any other phone, and everyone who doesn't know the older generation phone will react this way.

        This says more about psychology and especially trust in authority figures than anything about the iPhone or even phones for that matter.

        • Re:OMFG (Score:5, Informative)

          by adonoman ( 624929 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:44PM (#41367849)
          Except that at least one of the people interviewed had the current 4S, and was still blown away by the weight, look, and performance of the identical phone handed to him. These weren't people unfamiliar with iPhones.
      • Re:OMFG (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pdabbadabba ( 720526 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:58PM (#41368063) Homepage

        Ever wonder what percentage of people they interviewed actually made it on TV? It's hard to draw general conclusions from a handful of people saying stupid things on TV when saying that very stupid thing was required to get on television. Still: there is no doubt that those were some very stupid people.

        • I should have added: the subset of those people who owned iPhone 4Ses were very stupid. If you don't regularly use an iPhone 4S, then it's not so strange that you think an iPhone 4S is fast shiny and new. And it certainly doesn't say anything about the "mindset of Apple's userbase" if the people interviewed weren't iPhone users.

          And if I'm reading the other comments here correctly, nobody so much as alleges that this leaves more than a single very stupid person identified by Jimmy Kimmel.

        • Or as Bill Burr puts it, "of course having a gun in the house increases your chances of an accidental gun injury -- having a swimming pool in the backyard also increase your chances of drowning"
      • Re:OMFG (Score:4, Insightful)

        by whisper_jeff ( 680366 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @06:08PM (#41368189)

        Rick Mercer has gone out and talked to Americans and had many an interesting conversation. If that doesn't say something about the mindset of Americans, I don't know what does.

        Here, watch the video if you'd like a sample: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7111005509913775935 [google.ca]

        See what I did there. I used a comedian's skit where he puts a camera in someone's face and airs the best reactions to make a point. Interesting that, wouldn't you say? Might even relate to the point you're trying to make.

        • See what I did there. I used a comedian's skit where he puts a camera in someone's face and airs the best reactions to make a point. Interesting that, wouldn't you say? Might even relate to the point you're trying to make.

          Yes, I see what you did there. You missed the point. Wooshed it, you could even say. All this furvor over Apple's next product (whatever it is) is marketing. Perception equals reality for most people. They think the phone is faster because they're told it's faster, not because it is. It's like the difference between Coke and Pepsi. People insist they can tell the difference in taste, but when you take "Brown fizzy substance A" and "brown fizzy substance B" in a double-blind test, not many can.

          My point was

          • They think the phone is faster because they're told it's faster, not because it is.

            Actually, I think it's faster because it is faster. Or did you miss the story where it was made clear that Apple's claim of the phone being twice as fast as the 4S was confirmed?

            And while your commentary on marketing is valid, the point _I_ was trying to make, which seemed to do its own woosh for you, is that you can find a collection of random people on the street that will inevitably say anything you want to further paint the image you want. Kimmell wanted to make consumers look stupid. You even backed it

            • Throw a camera in someone's face (which makes them nervous and puts them off-kilter) and tell them you're showing them the new iPhone (or anything else you want) and you're likely to get enough people who believe you to provide amusing comments allowing you to make a humorous highlight reel.

              Well, with a large enough sample size, anything that would normally be improbable becomes probable. That's statistics, not human nature.

              You even backed it up with your "If that doesn't say something about the mindset of Apple's userbase, I don't know what does."

              Apple users are somehow more vulnerable to marketing than non-apple users. At least one company [dvorak.org] thinks so. There's any number of articles out there detailing the "cult of personality" surrounding the late Steve Jobs, and I don't know why I have to lay it out for you that Apple became big because of marketing. In technical specifications, Apple products are usually inferior

          • They think the phone is faster because they're told it's faster, not because it is.

            The new phone is actually faster, in many measurable ways. I assure you that when I get the newer phone I will be able to tell.

            My point was that people who buy Apple products buy them because of brand identity

            People buy things repeatedly because they liked how the older one worked and they'd like to repeat the same positive ownership experience with an updated model that has some improvement they like. It's about utility of

      • > Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S.

        Did that really happen? It isn't mentioned in your link-- I suspect that like a lot of these segments, they canvas for a while until they have enough idiots, and then edit the footage down to just the idiots.

        I'm not saying it's impossible, though.

      • Yes, cherry-picking some rubes off the street, and getting them to play to the camera and act enthusiastic for a celebrity waving a gadget in their face, demonstrates incredible generalizations about the entire Apple userbase. Parrotting such rubbish actually says a lot more about YOUR mindset.

        Do you seriously believe the same trick couldn't be pulled off with other devices?

        Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S.

        ERH MER GERD! NOT ONE!?

        The people who DID realize, were simply edited out. For all

      • Pretty stupid gag (Score:2, Insightful)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 )

        Jimmy Kimmel recently went out on the street 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

        Why would they? No-one has seen an iPhone 5, so they would be inclined to believe someone who said it was regardless of what you gave them. I didn't get the point of this at all, even as a joke it was just absurd.

        I mean, a guy with a camera crew shows up and hands you an object and says it is "X" and asks for though

        • The only saving grace of the sketch were the people who pulled out their iPhone 4s for comparison and began talking about how much faster, how much lighter, cooler, the thing was. Faster, well, new uncluttered phone, but still.

        • by vux984 ( 928602 )

          I mean, a guy with a camera crew shows up and hands you an object and says it is "X" and asks for thoughts. Are you going to disbelieve it's what they say it is??

          Sure I'll probably believe its what they say it is, but that's not the really the point. Lets assume I beleive its an iphone 5:

          On the one hand If I already have a 4S in my own pocket, then I'm probably not going to gush about how this "5" is lighter than the one in my pocket. Nor gush about how much faster it is. Nor gush about how much thinner it

    • Re:OMFG (Score:5, Informative)

      by PaulUTK ( 1085375 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:31PM (#41367691)
      I'm not sure you actually "read one more BS Apple story", this has nothing to do with how great Apple is. This was presented by Dr. Luszczek here in my research group at the Innovative Computing Laboratory to show the efficiency of ARM vs server class CPUs and GPUs. The only readily accessible ARM we could develop on at the time was the iPad2. As with most journalism, the main point of the presentation wasn't what the title of the story was.
      • Re:OMFG (Score:5, Informative)

        by AcidPenguin9873 ( 911493 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @07:10PM (#41368905)
        Slide 18 from this slide deck [utk.edu] is where you compare energy efficiency across processors. I see two major flaws in your methodology:
        1. You're using the TDP of each of the processors, instead of a measured power draw while running the benchmark. Are those other processors drawing their TDPs while running this benchmark? I doubt it. Usually the TDPs for any given processor are listed for some sort of power virus type test which is difficult if not impossible to hit running real code. It's possible that this benchmark hits the TDP of each of these processors, but I'd want proof of that, and generally I'd want measured power draws, not TDPs.
        2. More importantly, dynamic power scales quadratically with Voltage (P=C*V^2*F) (Wikipedia reference [wikipedia.org]). If you run these processors at a slower clockspeed and lower voltage, their power draw drops by the V^2*F factor. The performance slows down because of the lower frequency, sure, but you get a squared factor by decreasing voltage, plus some power reduction due to lower frequency, while only having a linear slowdown factor due to the lower frequency. In other words, they can get into a much more efficient power band by not running at their highest voltage/highest frequency. They can run up at high voltage/high frequency because users want super-responsive computers and super-fast GPUs, but for doing long-running power efficiency comparisons, you'd never run them that way. You'd find the sweet spot on the V/F curve and run them there. Cortex-A9 is designed to live at a different point on the perf/power/V/F curve - it's effectively already down at a lower frequency/lower power/lower peak performance point, yet at its performance point it is very efficient. You'd need to sweep across a range of freq/voltages to find the sweet spot of each processor before you compare them like this.
    • by Nemyst ( 1383049 )

      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!

      Don't worry, nobody ever reads TFA anyways.

    • Apple lovers must be stopped.

      Hey, don't blame us. We hate fluff stories too.

    • by abigor ( 540274 )

      Settle down, NumbNuts. They happened to use an iPad because it contains an ARM chip. It's idiots like you that make Slashdot basically unreadable.

      • Settle down, NumbNuts. They happened to use an iPad because it contains an ARM chip. It's idiots like you that make Slashdot basically unreadable.

        To be fair, the very mention of Apple products seems to have this effect on all public forums. It's as if there is some kind of Apple field that shuts down higher brain functions and forces everyone to revert to purely emotional reactions.

    • Re: (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.

    • You sound like a 40 year old virgin.
    • "Apple's iOS more complicated than Multics! Story at 11!"

  • Need to keep your genetically engineered amusement park attractions under control? There is an app for that!
  • by Ziggitz ( 2637281 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:09PM (#41367427)
    Newer smaller computer is faster than older larger computer! Some didn't think it possible, one of those people submitted the article under the false impression that anyone gave a fuck.
  • Does it run Linux?

    • Linux should be portable to the Cray platform. Sounds like a fun project, has anyone access to a Cray 2 for testing and debugging?

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      Yes [wikipedia.org]

      On a more serious note, the interest in this in terms of miniaturization and power optimization. The Cray was built for nuclear weapons testing. It was beyond the state of the art for the time. We are now seeing the state of the art in consumer toys, efficient use of electricity, materials, space.

  • > Performance improvements were made to the iPad 2 LINPACK software by writing Python

    You lost me there.

    > ...for generating and testing various Assembly routines.

    That makes more sense.

  • I knew the Cray-2 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikew03 ( 186778 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:12PM (#41367485)

    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.

    • Re:I knew the Cray-2 (Score:5, Informative)

      by ichthus ( 72442 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:42PM (#41367829) Homepage
      27 or so years its senior. [wikipedia.org] Wow, pretty neat, huh? Also, my Galaxy S2 is waaaaay faster than my Atari 800.
    • Re:I knew the Cray-2 (Score:4, Informative)

      by gander666 ( 723553 ) * on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:44PM (#41367851) Homepage

      When I started my Master's thesis, I began learning to program the Cray-XMP. In Fortran still, with some C (pre-ANSI C for you whippersnappers). Then I got a job, and that opportunity fell by the wayside. I still am in awe with how those machines were optimized.

      Of course today, I would just use Matlab, and if I needed more speed, I would compile it to C++ and run natively. But it has been a long time since I have done any serious number crunching.

      For a good read, pick up "Turing's Cathedral", it is a good story of the birth of electronic digital computers, and an eye-opener.

    • ... it was an awesome machine if you had the right kinds of problems for it to solve...

      Indeed it was, I got to use one briefly in the 90's that ran Unicos and it took my breath away. (When I typed "emacs" it started immediately!!)

    • I did Hello World on a Cray XMP. But I had to walk half way across campus to pick up the printout of the results.

  • But the iPad 2 doesn't have reciprocal approximation in place of the outdated mathermatical operation called division. Wake up Apple, it's the 21st century.
  • by Rob the Bold ( 788862 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:15PM (#41367517)

    . . . 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.

    • I'm not up on Linpack's innards, but Linpack results given by ROM dev's were always held in great skepticism because a dev could cheat the results by boosting performance in specific areas to make the results look better than they should have been. Is this what they did here?
      • I suppose 'measured at the chip level' makes this less likely than running a Linpack app on a device, but couldn't the results still be fudged in some way?
    • Yeah, the presentation says TDP so they didn't measure consumption. I guess Jack and Piotr didn't feel like cracking their iPad open and probing it with a voltmeter. Phoronix may have meant "counting only the chip" and made a syntactic error.
      • Update: Looking at David Kanter's site (graph 1 [realworldtech.com] and graph 2 [realworldtech.com]) the AMD parts and Intel server parts come in at about the efficiency listed in the chart (which again is based on peak performance and published TDP). NVIDIA's Kepler and Intel's Silverthorne seem to be more efficient in the real world than as presented from that calculation. I have no idea about the Cortex A9, there are a million different versions and I can't recall seeing hard numbers for the one in the iPad 2, some of which are on a 40 nm pr
    • by slew ( 2918 )

      ...To be "faster than a Cray-2", you really would need a Beowulf cluster of iPad processors.

      Cray2 -> 2GFLOPS total
      iPad2 -> dual-core 1GHz A9+ GPU...

      The Neon coprocessor on each ARM A9 is SIMD 2x32-bit Flops/clock. On this basis, it's not to hard to believe a single iPad2 has more raw Gflops than a Cray2 (w/o needing a beowulf cluster).

      On the other hand, the Cray2 was available way back in 1985, (the year that Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple)...

  • by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:17PM (#41367549)
    who has been publishing the Top 500 Supercomputer list for many, many years. I would bet that he ran Linpack himself on the Cray-2.
  • Evolution (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Decades of Moore's law and clever mniaturization lead us to freaking hipster filtering JPEG crap on Instagram, faster. Slow clap.

  • by cpotoso ( 606303 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:20PM (#41367569) Journal
    Will the cray2 blend as well as the ipad2?
    • Depends on how big a blender you have. The brochure [craysupercomputers.com] says the Cray 2 was 45 inches tall, 53 inches in diameter, and weighed 5500 pounds. [Aaaaaaand ... cue the "Yo Momma" jokes.] According to Guinness, the world's largest blender [guinnessworldrecords.com] was "4.79 m (16 ft 4 in) tall, 2.43 (8 ft) wide, 3.04 m (10 ft) deep and ... [was used] to make a 1, 324 litre (291 gal / 350 US gal) smoothie." Assuming the smoothie ingredients weighed the same as water, the blender was able to handle just shy of 3000 pounds. That's well shy of th

  • ARM Cortex-A9 easily beats the NVIDIA/AMD GPUs and latest Intel/AMD workstation CPUs in performance-per-Watt efficiency

    So, it is saying that a car with an engine that can get 400mpg is more economical than one with 30mpg, but they leave out the important part that it will take you 10x longer to get to your destination. I hate the trite "typical marketing", but that is what this is
    • by anss123 ( 985305 )

      So, it is saying that a car with an engine that can get 400mpg is more economical than one with 30mpg, but they leave out the important part that it will take you 10x longer to get to your destination. I hate the trite "typical marketing", but that is what this is

      Unlike with engines if it's truly better on the "performance per watt" scale you can build super computers with 10x, 100x, whatever it takes of extra chips, to get there faster on the same power budget; Which would make Arm A9 viable for people with LINPACK like workloads, unless the cost of extra networking gear (and other support hardware), kills them.

      Wasn't some company working on an Arm based super computer? They must be thrilled.

      • by scheme ( 19778 )

        So, it is saying that a car with an engine that can get 400mpg is more economical than one with 30mpg, but they leave out the important part that it will take you 10x longer to get to your destination. I hate the trite "typical marketing", but that is what this is

        Unlike with engines if it's truly better on the "performance per watt" scale you can build super computers with 10x, 100x, whatever it takes of extra chips, to get there faster on the same power budget; Which would make Arm A9 viable for people with LINPACK like workloads, unless the cost of extra networking gear (and other support hardware), kills them. Wasn't some company working on an Arm based super computer? They must be thrilled.

        Wrong. There's always going to be steps where only a single thread of execution can run. Those steps will determine how much of a speed up parallelization will get you. Adding more processors will just result in more processors idling when those bottlenecks occur and if your processors are not fast enough at those bottlenecks, then it could be much better to get fewer more powerful processors so that bottlenecks are finished more quickly.

        • by anss123 ( 985305 )
          LINPACK is highly parallel. I.e. why I stated "LINPACK like workloads".

          How useful LINPACK is to super computers isn't within my field of expertise, but if Arm is truly better on a performance per watt scale and some other constraint don't step in, then it does not matter how much faster a single chip is than the arm solution, as one can just add more arms (for LINPACK like workloads).

          I'm somewhat skeptical to that article, reads too much like an advertisement, but the results may still be significant
  • by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:24PM (#41367617) Homepage Journal

    I would hope we had advanced since then. The point of this 'revelation' was what? Click ad revenue generation?

  • by jsveiga ( 465473 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:24PM (#41367623)

    It has been demonstrated that the ipad 2 is lighter than an Apple II.

    The ipad 2 user interface has been tested and proven much better than the Zilog Z80's.

    On a blind test, the ipad's screen resolution has been voted subjectively better than the MSX's!

    And an independent research confirmed that it has more available apps than the HP41C!

    In a random test with a control group, 3 out of 5 teenagers prefer the ipad when offered the option of an ipad or a Newton, and 2 out of 4 girls prefer the ipad over Justin "Beaver".

    Oh my God, the ipad is really the best thing in the whole universe! No, it has been demonstrated that it is better than 5 universes put together with whipped cream and strawberries on top!!

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:24PM (#41367625)

    This far in, and still no comments about a Beowulf Cluster of iPads.

    What has Slashdot become?

  • by Teun ( 17872 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:25PM (#41367631)
    What a wasteful world we live in.

    All these great things that have been done on a Cray now equal the numbing stupidity of things like Facebook on an iPad?

  • by Wansu ( 846 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @05:38PM (#41367777)

    ... if dropped on your foot.

  • I find that to be simply amazing that hand-held consumer devices are only now matching and exceeding computing hardware that was invented over 27 years ago.

  • One of the slides is titled "Let's Do Assembly ... in Python"

  • Decades later, technological advancements have been made! Everyone (especially those brainwashed Apple cultists) was astounded when science decided it wasn't going to sit there and do nothing!

  • by OldSport ( 2677879 ) on Monday September 17, 2012 @06:47PM (#41368671)

    Guess what? Computing power has increased exponentially in the last three decades. If this surprises you you're an idiot. I mean, ten years ago I paid $2,000 for a Toshiba laptop with a whopping 1 GB of RAM and a 20G hard disk; now I can get a Tracfone with better specs than that.

    Slashdot sure seems to have its collective mouth wrapped tightly around the iSchlong lately.

  • I remember during the 32 & 64 bit era a lot of people would mention console performance vs X-rays. Big deal, it's old hardware. Of course new stuff is more lots of power in a much smaller bit of kit.
  • I think the Cray 2 could print something and it anticipated the future by not having USB or an SD card slot.

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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