|
|
|
|
|
|
by dkbrk
846 days ago
|
|
|
> so saying 'chemical batteries that can react in milliseconds' is understating the speed by a factor of ten million. that's like saying 'jet planes that can fly meters per day', 'supercomputers that can do dozens of multiplications per minute', or 'skyscrapers that can reach tens of microns in height' I checked your analogies for jet planes and skyscrapers, and found them to be well within an order of magnitude of ten million, but you're off on your supercomputer analogy by a factor somewhere in the range of a billion. I couldn't find a hard definition of what constitutes a supercomputer. The bottom of the Top 500 list is in the single-digit petaflop range and an RTX 4090 has 70 or 80 single-precision teraflops, and presumably you need more than a handful of graphics cards to constitute a supercomputer, so let's say 1 petaflop is our threshold for a supercomputer. The ratio of a petaflop to 12 flops/minute is 5e15, or 5 million billion. Saying "a factor of ten million is like saying 'supercomputers that can do dozens of multiplications per minute'" is like saying 'the moon orbits meters above the Earth's surface'. |
|
|
unlike the other examples, the category of 'supercomputer' has shifted over time. initially, i was thinking of a cray-1, which is the machine that popularized the term 'supercomputer' https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=supercomputer&.... it was only about 160 megaflops, which is ten million times 960 calculations per minute. that wouldn't normally be described as 'dozens'; it's about an order of magnitude high. so i should have done my calculations a bit more carefully
up to the late 90s, when the term 'supercomputer' had largely fallen out of use, top-end supers were still in the low-digit gigaflops: https://www.hpcwire.com/1997/04/04/tera-mta-computer-posts-b...
you are of course correct that current machines are many orders of magnitude faster than that, and even a single video card is about three orders of magnitude faster