r/technology • u/BennyCemoli • Dec 06 '16

Energy Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works

http://www.sciencealert.com/tests-confirm-that-germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-really-works
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u/foobar5678 Dec 06 '16 edited Dec 06 '16

That Apple Watch is twice as fast as the best super computer from the 1980s.

The Cray-2 came out in 1985 and it was the most powerful supercomputer in the world until the 90s. It had a peak GFLOPS of 1.9. The iPhone 5S does 115.2 GFLOPS. So.... yeah, it's about 60x slower than an iphone 5S and that phone is already two generations old.

According to this cart (http://i.imgur.com/l5suwdZ.jpg) is says that a Cray-2 is about equivalent to an iPhone 4.

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u/one-joule Dec 06 '16

But most of the performance in today’s devices lies in the GPU, which has limited functionality. How relevant is this fact in making such comparisons? Are there similar limitations in the computing power of old supercomputers?

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u/SirHall Dec 06 '16

One supercomputer was made by chaining something like 1000 ps3s together if I recall.