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And meanwhile today you can get more power than the Cray-1 (or Cray-2) from a single chip a fraction of the size of that coin.

Very quickly:

  a dollar coin is about 550 mm^2 on a face
  the Cray-1 could do 160 MFLOPS
  an M1 chip has a die size of 120 mm^2
  an M1 chip can do over 1 TFLOPS


The “over 1 TFLOPS” claim for the M1 appears to be for single precision floats whereas FLOPS performance figures for supercomputers, including the one given for the CRAY-1, are almost always based on double precision (FP64) floats. The double precision FLOPS performance of the M1 would be lower, perhaps half of the single precision performance.


I had just gone down this rabbit hole for unrelated reasons (looking into yields). Nvidia's 5090 die is 750 mm^2, managing 419 TFLOPS on the FP16 benchmark.




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