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Comment by ziggit | Hacker News Reader

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ziggit·

I always like to play a game when I'm carrying multiple laptops in a backpack:

What's the latest year that my backpack be a Top 500 Supercomputing center.

The results can be pretty entertaining sometimes.

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That reminds me of the joke about the A7 in the iPhone being faster than the old PowerPC cores in the G5s, which wasn't the first time that a phone's processor beat an older laptop's, but the first time that the comparison was Apple's to Apple's. Terrible pun, but it happened in what, a 5 year span?

I play the same game, and I love it (no one ever believes me about it, either).

The equivalence I use now is that the iPhone 5s is roughly as fast as the first gen macbook air.

I'm being pedantic (sorry), but to the best of my knowledge, there never was a G5 laptop, which is one of the reasons for the switch to Intel.

Ah, no, you're correct! I had originally misremembered the statement (going with G4 and laptop), and forgot to change the word laptop to desktop when I switched it to the G5. That was totally my bad.

My desktop, that I pieced together in 2011, has more computing power (including the GPU) than the fastest supercomputer in 1999 (~3 TFLOPS for GPU+CPU perf).

If you have some cash burning a hole in your pocket, you can piece together a ~10 TFLOP machine today entirely from NewEgg without doing anything too fancy.

Technology is funny.

Are you sure about that? The TOP500 list uses the linpack benchmark to measure double-precision FLOPS. The numbers you cite for your machine sound more like those you would get with single-precision.

For comparision, the GTX Titan can do about 1.5 TFLOPS in double-precision and about 3.2 TFLOPS in single-precision doing GEMM.

Well shit, you're right, I'm an idiot.

When did world computing power pass the equivalent of one iPhone? http://pemungkah.com/when-did-world-computing-power-pass-the...

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