Super Raspberry

 There's a list called TOP500, indexing the 500 most powerful (known) computers.  Obviously, the NSA's super secret computers aren't on the list.    This list has been around for many years, released every June and November.   

Topping the list in June 2022 is the Frontier HPE CRAY EX235A.  This absolute beast runs 8,730,112 AMD cores, rated at 1,685.65 PFlop/s.   Let me rewrite that a few times:  1.6 Exaflots/second. 1685650Teraflops/s.  1685650000 Gigaflops/s.

But I want to call your attention to an older version, published in July, 1997.   That year's #500 was SX-4/4, built by NEC for the Houston Area Research Center in the USA.  With it's 8GFlops/S, this nearly doubled November 1996's last place computer in the  Goodyear  Technical Center in Luxembourg, clocking in at 4.6GFLOPS.  This is quite a bit slower than the créme-de-la-créme of 25 years later.  It sure shows the march of progress.

By November 1997, the last place would raise to 9.5, marking 1997 the last year the Raspberry PI 3 with its whopping 6.2 GFLOPS would have qualified for the list. 

In case you were wondering, the Raspberry Pi 4, with its 13.5 Gflops/s, would have been 496th in November 1997.   By June 1998, the 500th place was 15 Gflops/s.  The Radeon RX 500 video card is rated 6175 GFLOPS at 185w, which is in the range of the TOP500 for November 2006.


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