For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second.
Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.
> Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.
Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times faster than Cray-1.
Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As such it was designed to push the performance envelope in a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction processing and reliability. They were substantially slower than contemporary supercomputers.
That's true, but supercomputers are somewhat conceptually similar to GPUs, so it seems like a better comparison to illustrate technological progress. Comparing mainframes and GPUs is comparing apples and oranges.
This is a good analogy. If you look at a modern mainframe CPU it becomes pretty clear where the differences lie. Fewer, beefier cores with a lot of focus on cache.
Supercomputers tend to use more conventional cores, but way more of them, and connect them in a large fabric. There's a lot more focus on parallelization and horizontal scaling.
Mainframe overall compute is nowhere near a supercomputer, and you probably shouldn't be running a massive physics simulation on a mainframe, but you may get more consistency and reliability for well defined tasks.
your phone is 5–10 billion instructions per second, a thousand times faster. it's probably a quad-core in-order arm running at 1–2 gigahertz, not 1–2 terahertz
not equivalent, but close enough in this case; even my laptop only manages less than 2 ipc per core, and the error in your earlier comment is a factor of 1000
I think we need to put it in terms of smart watches now, soon smart rings.
Hope we remaining masters can stop the delusional tech bastards running around convinced they're a new and more powerful Steve Jobs (oblivious that his success came from leveraging microprocessors to put millions of formally educated tech people with families out of work in a disorderly manner by disrupting the market) from further inflating the public stock markets (again) and distorting energy capX over AI hype. AWernerS is clearly losing the battle against them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe8Snxu3wo
For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second.
Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.