Get the latest tech news

Cray versus Raspberry Pi

I fondly recall the era when the pinnacle of supercomputing was the Cray 1. Even the shape of this computer was massively different to anything that came before and it was so futuristic that it could have come straight from a scifi movie.

Never the less, the Cray was a pretty hefty bit of kit, weighing in at over 5 tonnes (most of that being the cooling system) and consuming a staggering 115KW of electricity when its 64-bit processor was chugging along at 80MHz and interrogating the 8MB of memory it was attached to. You can crunch your own numbers to calculate interesting things like the "bang per buck" ratio of these two machines but it's very, very apparent through this comparison, just how rapidly our computer technology has advanced over recent decades. That we can fit a terabyte onto a microSD card smaller than your thumbnail also boggles my mind -- especially when I remember all those years ago that a regular 16 pin DIP integrated circuit was doing well to store just a single Kbyte of data.

Get the Android app