Is a Cray Computer in 1985 more powerful than Present Day Game Devices?

[tmcom]

No, is the basic answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1

Costed about 8 million in 1977, (80's) or $35m in todays terms, with about 2 gigaflops per second, (well 2 gig in 1985 and mega, beforehand).

So breaking the numbers down, a Nintendo Oled can do about 12 Teraflops per second.

There are 500 2x gigaflops in one teraflop, (so a Nintendo Oled is 500 times faster per TF or 6000 times faster than something the size of a small room and costing millions instead of $500).

This puts it in perspective, The Last Starfighter, (1984) used a Cray, which was reported to be crunching roughly 20 gigaflops per second, (going by memory couldn't find any material).
 

And remember that its top speed was about 2 per second, so about 10 seconds to render one seconds worth of video.

And something that we can hold in our hands is 6000 times faster and millions cheaper, meaning it could render the scenes above in real time without blinking.

I grew up with a Cray Computer poster on my wall drooling about what l could do with it, and now l have something far more powerful.

And by the way China has the fastest supercomputer at 61 Pflops per second, (or 1000 trillion operations per second if it did 1Pflop). Or 6100 trillion calculations per second, present day.

[YellowDragon]

It is crazy what computers used to cost and we think they are so expensive now LOL

I like to look back at older devices from the late '80s and through the '90s. I still have my first family computer in fact from 1996. Still works!

[tmcom]

On 12/22/2022 at 9:46 AM, YellowDragon said:

It is crazy what computers used to cost and we think they are so expensive now LOL

I like to look back at older devices from the late '80s and through the '90s. I still have my first family computer in fact from 1996. Still works!

Correction there is one in the US, that can do 200 Petaflops.

https://www.popsci.com/summit-supercomputer/

And is water cooled, (well non conducting fluorocarbon) like the Cray was.

Tried to find some examples of virtual environments using a petaflop system but none available, or it seems that it is only used for crunching numbers or seeing the DNA of life, etc.

Quote

To tackle the task of helping create Avatar, it took the Weta Digital super computers processing up to 1.4 million tasks per day to render the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month. Avatar!

I thought that James C. would be using one, (Avatar) but quite ironically his is only 4 times faster than the 80's cray was, but probably required a minute or two for each second for the resent installments.