[zouhair]

These comparisons are fun at all but a better one would be the difference between whatever "computer" a citizen lambda would have used back in the day and the cray1 and whatever on can use now and the current "cray" (or whatever humans use now) and see the difference of cost.

[kayodelycaon]

I did a little poking round and I think the modern equivalent to old super computers is a mainframe. Modern super computers take up entire warehouses, cost upwards of $100 million, and are measured in exaflops.

Cray 1 costs US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $41 million in 2024) (Source: Wikipedia)

I have no idea what IBM z-series mainframes cost but I think it would be less.

$41 million can buy you one or more thousands of rack-mounted servers and the associated networking hardware.

My rough guess would be the difference in 2024 iphones to mainframes is an order of magnitude more between them than Cray and anything else on the market at the time.

It’s also interesting to note how much software has changed. The actual machine code may be less optimized, but we have better algorithms and we have the option of using vast amounts of memory and disk to save cpu time. And that’s before we get into specialized hardware.

[giantrobot]

Mainframes aren't supercomputers. The point of a mainframe (anymore) is reliable transactions without downtime. They're not necessarily beasts at computation.

Supercomputers were and are beasts of not only computation but memory size and bandwidth. They're used for tasks where the computation is highly parallel but the memory is not. If you're doing nuclear physics or fluid dynamics every particle in a simulation has some influence on every other. The more particles and more state for each particle you can store and apply to every other particle makes for a more accurate simulation.

As SCs have improved in memory size and bandwidth simulations/modeling with them has gotten more accurate and more useful.

[dardeaup]

Agreed! If you look at the branding from IBM for their various hardware lines, it's clear that they agree with you:

    zSeries: z = "zero" downtime
    iSeries: i = "integration" (DB2 baked into OS)
    pSeries: p = "performance"

[cratermoon]

The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. That same year Gary Kildall created CP/M and Steve Wozniak completed the Apple-1.