Opening paragraph:

> The Cray Research, Inc. CRAY-1 Computer System is a large-scale, general-purpose digital computer featuring vector as well as scalar processing, a 12.5 nanosecond clock period, and a 50 nanosecond memory cycle time. The CRAY-1 is capable of executing over 80 million floating point operations per second.

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twoodfin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance.

That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.

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chasil 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Seymour Cray never designed a silicon microprocessor. I wonder what he would have created had that opportunity presented itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray

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firecall 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is?

Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s!

Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!

	▲	qsera an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is.. Sadly most of that power is not working for you, most of the time, but working against you, by spying, tracking and manipulating you. Bet that was not include in your sci-fi dreams in 70s..
	▲	hypersoar 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		From the Wikipedia article on the Cray 1: "The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance ... By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."
	▲	wmoxam an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Recently I've found myself wanting a tricorder type device.
	▲	FridayoLeary 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		At the risk of sounding cliche i'll point out that ios probably uses several times the capacity of a cray 1 just to get the keyboard to work.

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fnord77 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not terribly impressive considering an average 20 year old super computer c. 2005 is still about 100x as fast as today's best consumer cpus

	▲	twoodfin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, yeah, Dennard scaling ended around 20 years ago!