Comments on: Japan designers shoot for supercomputer on a chip

The MDGrape 3 chip will calculate faster than most supercomputers in existence, its creators say.

[emc2]

comparison

From: Vareck Bostrom ([e-mail])
Subject: Re: 18 gigaflops?
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Date: 2003-01-09 22:06:28 PST

I ran the old flops 2.0 test some time ago on both of my own macs, a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz from work and an Itanium 733 Mhz (also from work). I got:

CPU flops(6) - was peak for all machines
Itanium 733 2022.8883 MFLOPS (2.2 GigaFlops)
P4-1700SSE 1332.1317 MFLOPS (1.3 GigaFlops)
P4-1700 475.3642 MFLOPS (0.475 GigaFlops)
G4-800DP 308.3056 MFLOPS (0.308 GigaFlops)
G3-700 311.9328 MFLOPS (0.311 GigaFlops)

In article <dmartinZZZ-0901032106520001@192.168.0.5>,
[e-mail] (Danny Martin) wrote:

> Apple's web site touts the twin 1.25 ghz processor turning 18 gigaflops. Is it valid to compare gigaflops between PPC chips and Pentiums? If so, how many gigaflops does a 2 ghz Pentium turn?

A 2 GHz Pentium 4 would manage about 8 GFLOPS single precision peak. This has come and gone in this newsgroup a couple times and I'm not
really sure how apple comes up with their numbers.

This is all theoretical peak and it doesn't really have much to do with real performance, it's mostly just a matter of adding numbers together

[emc2]

its a special use processor

Article says, "The computational power comes, he said, because the chip is specialized for workloads that involve numerous, similar calculations on a comparatively small set of data. This sort of workload is common in the life sciences and bio-nanotechnology field"

Another words the performance would really suck if you tried to run an normal desktop application on it, but its really good at adding and multiplying huge mega-sets of data. Sort of like an idiot savant.

[emc2]

small set of data

"similar calculations...on small set of data".

This phrase is really interesting. This seems to suggest the perfermance test case is just holding the data in its CPU's registers and performaning the same calculations over and over again without needing to access the external memories that would slow it down.

Its fast, but its not a very useful thing for a general purpose processor to do. Its kind of silly to compare this processor with a general purpose computer. Great, it can calculate lots of stuff if it sits in a black box and doesn't communiate with the outside world and your program needs to repeat the same caluation over and over again.