Re: rant

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

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.

I had heard of FLOPS via MATLAB, which reports the number of FLOP in each instruction.  I hadn't realized that the S in FLOPS was for seconds, which was why it didn't make sense to me.  I'm really surprised at the numbers especially for Cray.  2 FLOPS sounds kind of primitive. MATLAB had operations on the order of 1 teraflop for one instruction. Of course, these could take a few minutes to execute.