63 years = 340 million times faster

[swarfega]

63 years = 340 million times faster.
Computer advancements in size and speed since WW2

1946, ENIAC, A machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.
Start of project: 1943
Completed: 1946
Programmed: plug board and switches
Speed: 5,000 operations per second
Input/output: cards, lights, switches, plugs
Floor space: 1,000 square feet
Project leaders: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.

2009,Roadrunner
Dates operational 2008
Final completion 2009
Sponsors IBM, United States
Operators National Nuclear Security Administration, United States
Location Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States
Architecture 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs, 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors, Infiniband, Linux
Power 2.35 MW
Space 296 racks, 560 m2 (6,000 sq ft)
Memory 103.6 TiB
Speed 1.71 petaflops* (theoretical peak)
Cost USD $125M
Ranking TOP500: 1, June 2008
Purpose Modeling the decay of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Legacy First TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops, May 25, 2008

*A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

1946 5000/sec
2008 1700000000000000/sec

 

[Lee]

. . .coooooooooooool

 

[Charbroil57]

Basic thoughts...

Almost all of our computers are faster and can store more information than the one used by NASA for the first moon launch... and that one took up an entire room.

If you buy an up-to-the-minute computer today, next week it will be outdated... the pace of advances in technology today is greater than it has ever been.

By the time I write this and post it to the forum... someone has come up with a better and faster way to do it.

This is exactly why I don't worry to much about the WEI... if my computer is receiving a respectable score and is fast and stable... then I am as happy as a bug in a rug!

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Thanks for the article Nick.


Yeah the WEI is just a marketing tool.

 

[swarfega]

Its just a very interesting comparison and its amazing to see how far we've come.

 

[Lee]

The brain trust in the technology world indicate that we double our intelligence in the tech world every other year. Just plain fascinating.

 

[Barman58]

Just one word on the WEI score,

It's main use in my opinion is as a comparative tool. If you are building more than one similar machine it's a good check that everything is working/set-up on each machine correctly.

Even on a single machine re-running the WEI after installing new hardware or drivers is a useful quick test for changes.

I've never been a fan of any benchmark tools but having this built in to the OS can be useful at times

 

[raj11650]

road runner isnt anymore the fastest comp on planet!!!

 

[jfar]

That's really some difference in speed, amazing.