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To: Bobalu
The 100mhz ARM that controls an ordinary SD card is more powerful.

Well, sort of. The Cray had quite a number of ports into memory to perform I/O. I saw a Cray that was front-ended with eight IBM 360s, each tasked with reading multiple tape and disk drives, card readers, and a fair number of 1403-N1 line printers concurrently. While the chips of today are amazingly fast, they do not interface with the world through so many peripherals. Also, the Cray had a floating point word size that today's microcomputers don't even come close to matching. The Cray was a floating point number cruncher, not a mere 32 or 64 bits in width. It consisted of a number of cores. The processor in an SD card doesn't even come close to those capabilities.

31 posted on 10/02/2015 9:12:32 PM PDT by GingisK
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To: GingisK

That’s very interesting.

I’d always just assumed the Cray was a 32 bit machine.

The physical construction of the Cray looked like it was built by a plumber... all those copper pipes and fittings :-)


35 posted on 10/02/2015 9:56:54 PM PDT by Bobalu (Russians.... not ashamed of being white!)
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