How the PicoCray Was Made

meepmorp · on July 28, 2023

I wonder what fraction of a real Cray-1’s computing power is in that thing.

primis · on July 28, 2023

The Cray-1 had 160 MFLOPS, and a single Pico has about 133 KFLOPS, so 8 of them would be just over 1 megaflop (not accounting for any overhead). So about 1/160th!

kjs3 · on July 28, 2023

That's only part of the story. Cray spent a lot of time architecting an I/O system that could keep the CPU fed. So peak and sustained performance were closer than a lot of systems.

meepmorp · on July 28, 2023

Thanks!

jameskilton · on July 28, 2023

I think you need to reverse this statement actually. How many CRAY-1 would you need to match the processing power of PicoCray?

CRAY-1: 80MHz, 160 MFLOPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1)

PicoCray: 133MHz * 8 (https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/)

mechagodzilla · on July 28, 2023

Can a RasPi Pico do a double-precision floating point op every cycle?

FounderBurr · on July 28, 2023

‘Made’