Just as a point of reference, an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series video card can do 1 TFlops/second (yes, that's Teraflops - 1x10^12 floating point operations per second). Pretty amazing for cards in the sub $200 range. It's not hard to see why folks would try to make these GPUs into general purpose machines.
Eric -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter G. Viscarola Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 9:10 AM To: FlexRadio Reflector Subject: Re: [Flexradio] [OT] Mac mini as PowerSDR machine > >A Cray-1 ain't *nearly* enough machine to run it, sad to say. > Now THAT's interesting. I LOVE the comparisons between the old gear I used to use and that we thought was so fast with the ordinary PCs we take for granted daily. MAN, I remember being AMAZED by the speed of the Cray-1 back in the late 70s. I still have the architecture manual around here somewhere. I spent some time looking this up (Google being my friend)... the Cray-1 was widely reported as being capable of 100-200 MFlops/second. Depending on what you measure and how (SSE? SSE3?) Xeon machines today are capable of between 800 and 4,000 MFlops/second. YMMV and all that. So... a PC beats a Cray-1 hands-down. And while the PC will fit on your desk, it doesn't have the comfy leather cushions around the outside (over the power supplies). So, the Cray still wins by that measure. Peter K1PGV _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/