Re: rant

On Mon, 12 Aug 2024 12:19:58 -0500, Altered Beast
<j63480576@gmail.com> wrote:

Kyonshi wrote:

On 8/4/2024 6:09 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:

On 8/3/2024 10:38 PM, Mark P. Nelson wrote:

Look, the whole point of the *personal* computer was that you didn't
have to rent time from
IBM to figure out your profit/loss balance.
>
Ever since then, every computer company has been trying desperately
to revive the "You
only rent it" model to bolster their bottom line, no matter their
public face on the question.
>
We're getting closer and closer to no longer having personal
computers which we own and
can configure/control as we wish but rather Microsoft or Banana
computers for which we pay
a regular fee.
>
Pfui!

>
Its not just computers.
>

 
well, by now lots of things have more computing power than was used to
get man to the moon. e.g. cars.

>
What units are computing power measured in?

Here's a layman's answer. I'm sure experts in the field will take
issue with some of my descriptions but I think its a good enough
overall introduction.

FLOPS and IPS are the units that I've typically seen used. The former
- Floating Point Operations Per Second - calculates how fast the
computer can do arithmetic calculations, which is a 'real-world'
example of what PCs do. After all, in the end everything we ask our
computers to do revolves around maths, so knowing how fast it can run
a calculation is the best measurement between computers.

IPS - Instructions Per Second - counts how many internal instructions
the CPU can parse each second. However, because of differences in
CPUs, IPS doesn't directly scale to output; a calculation that takes
one type of CPU three instructions may take a different architecture
five instructions and a third architecture might need twelve.


FLOPS is more useful for comparing actual performance between
different computers (e.g., your phone versus your home PC versus an
F-35 fighter jet). IPS is really only useful for comparing between
similar architectures (e.g., an Intel 13900 and an Intel 13700). There
are also different ways of measuring a CPUs performance, which causes
different results depending on which method you used.

Precision (how many decimal points you use) also effects the results
of FLOPs benchmarking; some computers only have 16-bit precision,
others go up to 64-bit. Many early computers also lacked dedicated
hardware for floating-point calculations, and so had to 'brute-force'
the math at a significant hit to performance. Others were specialized
for floating point performance at a cost to 'regular' arithmetic used
for a lot of user operations. And -especially with older computers-
architectural differences were so radically different that comparisons
are almost impossible. So even FLOPS comparisons aren't an absolute
indicator of which CPU is best, since the usage the computer will be
put to matters a lot.

And none of this takes into consideration other issues like how much
memory the computer has, how quickly it can transfer data back and
forth, etc., all of which affect the rate of output almost as much as
the actual CPU speed. Measuring performance is /hard/.



Obviously given the speed of modern PCs, these numbers tend to be
huge. In fact IPS is usually referred to as MIPS (Millions of
Instructions Per Second). Modern super-computers count performance in
Peta-FLOPS (1 quadrillion FLOPS)



Some FLOPS comparisons (stolen unabashedly from wiki)
------------------------------------------------------
Eniac .004 FLOPS
Intel 486 0.128 FLOPS (32bit)
Cray 1 2 FLOPS (64bit)
AMD Threadripper 2000 16 (32bit) or 8 (64bit) FLOPS
ARM Cortex v7 8 (32bit) or 1 (64bit) FLOPS


    [ The scores above are measured per cycle, so to
      get actual performance, take the bench mark number
      and multiply it by cores and MHz ]


An alternate comparison (stolen from a variety of sources)
-------------------------------------------------
Apollo 11 AGC ~14 FLOPS
Intel 486 DX 33 MHz ~270 FLOPS
CRAY-1 @ 80 MHz ~160 Mega FLOPS
Ryzen 3 3200G (4 core, 3.6 GHz) ~1280 Giga FLOPS
HPE Cray EX235a "Frontier" ~1206 Peta-FLOPS



 
Some MIPS comparisons (also stolen from wikipedia)
------------------------------------------------------
Univac 0.002 MIPS @ 2.25 MHz
IBM System 370 0.640 MIPS @ .9 MHz
Intel 8080 0.290 MIPS @ 2 MHz
MOS 6502 0.430 MIPS @ 1 MHZ
CRAY-1 160 MIPS @ 60 MHZ
Intel 486 8.7 MIPs @ 25 MHz
ARM Cortex A7 2850 MIPS @ 1.5 GHz
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (64 core) 2.35 Million MIPS @ 4.35 GHz