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View Full Version : Is it true that modern PCs are faster than 70s 80s and early 90s Supercomputers ?



asifnaz
June 23rd, 2012, 08:19 AM
I always wonder how powerful were those supercomputers . I have been told that modern PCs are powerful than those supercomputers .

Any info..?

I will really appreciate any useful links

thanks

aviedw
June 23rd, 2012, 08:29 AM
The short ansswer is yes. I believe this link and the sources provided should help you towards understanding the comparison of old super computers to modern PC's.

Just as a side note the first Super Computer ran at 80 mhz

Here is the link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#History

asifnaz
June 23rd, 2012, 09:04 AM
The short ansswer is yes. I believe this link and the sources provided should help you towards understanding the comparison of old super computers to modern PC's.

Just as a side note the first Super Computer ran at 80 mhz

Here is the link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#History

Thats amazing how fast modern PCs has become . What about supercomputers from 80s and 90s..?

Paqman
June 23rd, 2012, 09:27 AM
Thats amazing how fast modern PCs has become . What about supercomputers from 80s and 90s..?

The link aviedw posted gives you some details.

pitroadrush
June 23rd, 2012, 12:35 PM
IBM built this new super computer i believe they called Watson suppose to be the Skynet of all computers...

mips
June 23rd, 2012, 01:18 PM
I always wonder how powerful were those supercomputers . I have been told that modern PCs are powerful than those supercomputers .

Any info..?

I will really appreciate any useful links

thanks

If you include a expensive GPU as part of the PC then yes probably.

If you are only referring to the CPU then:
For the 70s & 80s I would say yes. In the 90s supercomputers became massively parallel and modern desktop CPUs still can't match that.

GPUs due to their parallel architecture would give you a much higher FLOP rating compare to say a Core i7. I think a nVidia GTX 680 will give you about 3TFLOPS while the latest core i7 will give you low figures in the GFLOP range.

codingman
June 23rd, 2012, 02:42 PM
IBM built this new super computer i believe they called Watson suppose to be the Skynet of all computers...

It's really not that amazing, they just mushed together all of the sound recognition, lots of historical data from previous jeopardy games and what they blindfold people by saying machine learning in order to awe people but really it's just searching through many articles and stuff from previous jeopardy games and returns the result. Plus, who really needs 10 more refrigerators in their house just to compute that sort of thing while you can do it in your head that can even do more than the computer can and be 40 times smaller.

Anyways, I'm still fine with my Asus A8N-SLI with F16 on it...

oldos2er
June 23rd, 2012, 05:07 PM
Always loved the look of Crays: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray
Too bad they went bankrupt.

If you want to while away some time, visit http://www.computerhistory.org/
They also have a youtube channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory

mips
June 23rd, 2012, 08:05 PM
Always loved the look of Crays: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray
Too bad they went bankrupt.


Companies like Cray, SGI etc missed the plot later on. Their specialist custom hardware was easily replaced by off the shelf commodity stuff. They tried to swim upstream and lost against the current.

PS. I was a big SGI fan and still would not mind owning one of their boxes.

Bandit
June 23rd, 2012, 08:55 PM
Always loved the look of Crays: ..........

So did I. :)


High end Desktops these days are far more powerfull then Super Computers from the mid and late 90's. Even if you had a Beowulf Cluster of a Dozen 500Mhz Athlons from year 1999. A low end Dual Core will easily surpass it. Its not just the CPUs but the Bus architecture and everything has got so much better.

scania_gti
June 23rd, 2012, 09:20 PM
Hardware parameters - not realy talk about computer speed.
I think, modern PC with modern OS not faster than old supercomputers with theirs OS :)

Bandit
June 23rd, 2012, 09:22 PM
Hardware parameters - not realy talk about computer speed.
I think, modern PC with modern OS not faster than old supercomputers with theirs OS :)

Dont think response time of outdated applications loading is in question. But how they would fair against one or another given a benchmarking based on equal grounds if it is even possible.

KiwiNZ
June 23rd, 2012, 09:25 PM
Given that the computer is the operating software the processing power of current OS's is vastly greater than the software from the 70's or 80's, that means that modern computers are faster.

jmore9
June 23rd, 2012, 10:09 PM
I once had a 8088 based machine. Now this was top of the line when it first came out. I think it is an 8 bit cpu don't remember for sure. A modern cpu is 32 bits or 64bits / dual core.

There was no internet back then, We had what is known as BBS systems. You used your telephone and a dialup modem to access it. It had forums, game windows, downloads, etc. Just had to be sure you called a local number or the long distance tolls could cost you a lot of money.

There was no such thing as hard drives back then. We got all our software on 5 and quarter inch floppy disks. I thnk they were 180k storage, i have a total of 16 megs of rams and thought i was at the top of the world , the max possible at that time.

The video was on a green screen crt monitor no flat panels/lcds back then. I rememeber getting a copy of word perfect and it came on a bunch of 5 quater inch floppies and it ran in dos.

Everything ran in dos back then. When windows 3.1 version one came out it was mostly a graphical file manager. The first true windows operating system in my opinion was windows 95 second edition.

forrestcupp
June 24th, 2012, 01:50 AM
PS. I was a big SGI fan and still would not mind owning one of their boxes.
When I was going to college in 1991, there was a Sun Microsystems store down the road from me that sold SGI Unix boxes. If I recall correctly, the hardware specs were unbelievable compared to all the mainstream PCs back then. The prices definitely reflected that, though.

Bandit
June 24th, 2012, 05:20 AM
I once had a 8088 based machine. Now this was top of the line when it first came out. I think it is an 8 bit cpu don't remember for sure. A modern cpu is 32 bits or 64bits / dual core.

There was no internet back then, We had what is known as BBS systems. You used your telephone and a dialup modem to access it. It had forums, game windows, downloads, etc. Just had to be sure you called a local number or the long distance tolls could cost you a lot of money.

There was no such thing as hard drives back then. We got all our software on 5 and quarter inch floppy disks. I thnk they were 180k storage, i have a total of 16 megs of rams and thought i was at the top of the world , the max possible at that time.

The video was on a green screen crt monitor no flat panels/lcds back then. I rememeber getting a copy of word perfect and it came on a bunch of 5 quater inch floppies and it ran in dos.

You make it sound like it was all that long ago.. hehe :)
I somewhat miss those days, life seemed simpler. Always had a blast making colored ASCII graphics for my uncles BBS.

jmore9
June 24th, 2012, 07:17 AM
Best video game was the bouncing ball that you had to catch with the up and down slider on each side. Forgot the name of the game now. Tennis ?

Paqman
June 24th, 2012, 07:45 AM
Best video game was the bouncing ball that you had to catch with the up and down slider on each side. Forgot the name of the game now. Tennis ?

Pong! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong)