Quote:
Originally Posted by Shark Bait
I wish planetarium software like this existed when I was his age.
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Hi Stu!
And the hardware to run them on.
Consider that in 1976, a 64-bit Cray 1 supercomputer had a 80MHz clock cycle which
was good for 160 MIPS and the vector floating point unit around 160 MFLOPS peak.
It weighed 5.5 tons and consumed 115kW of power and if you ordered it with the
8 megabyte main memory, would set you back about USD8.8 million.
If it had been installed at home, at least the power supplies doubled as seating for guests.
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets...0/08/scray.jpg
Consider by comparison today a modest graphics card like a NVIDIA GeForce
GTX 770. It alone has a 1058 MHz clock, is good for 3.2 TFLOPS (i.e. 3.2 million MFLOPS),
consumes 230W and sells for less than $500.