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[Firmus_Anguis]

First off, I'm really no expert and I'm even half-expecting a scolding, heck maybe even a beat-down for this thread. But more importantly, I've always been curious about how far gaming has come; from a technical standpoint, we're seeing some amazing stuff from games like Uncharted 4. But - How far have we come? I'll just steal a couple of quotes here, to get things rolling.

In computing, FLOPS or flops (an acronym for floating-point operations per second) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations.

A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). As of 2015, there are supercomputers which can perform up to quadrillions of FLOPS.

Now I know, I know, supercomputers are used all around the world for all sorts of complex simulations and when it comes to movies, it still takes huge render farms several hours to render a single frame. Now as we all know, games don't work quite like that...

Although this is strictly meant to be a console/supercomputer comparison, feel free to mention how far we've come on the PC side of things. But using the most powerful console in the market (currently) as an example, the PS4 GPU's floating point performance is measured at around 1.84 TFLOPS. Now, I know I'm making wild generalizations, but please bear with me - Tolerate my ignorance for just a bit longer. Where does this put us, historically speaking, compared to the computational power of supercomputers?

Is if fair to make direct comparisons?

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful (non-distributed) computer systems in the world

So from this list, is it safe to assume a PS4 is somewhere between 97' and 99' in computational power?

1993 Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel 124.50 GFLOPS National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1993 Intel Paragon XP/S 140 143.40 GFLOPS DoE-Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1994 Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel 170.40 GFLOPS National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1996 Hitachi SR2201/1024 220.4 GFLOPS University of Tokyo, Japan
Hitachi CP-PACS/2048 368.2 GFLOPS University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
1997 Intel ASCI Red/9152 1.338 TFLOPS DoE-Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1999 Intel ASCI Red/9632 2.3796 TFLOPS
2000 IBM ASCI White 7.226 TFLOPS DoE-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2002 NEC Earth Simulator 35.86 TFLOPS Earth Simulator Center, Yokohama, Japan
2004 IBM Blue Gene/L 70.72 TFLOPS DoE/IBM Rochester, Minnesota, USA
2005 136.8 TFLOPS DoE/U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
280.6 TFLOPS
2007 478.2 TFLOPS
2008 IBM Roadrunner 1.026 PFLOPS DoE-Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA
1.105 PFLOPS
2009 Cray Jaguar 1.759 PFLOPS DoE-Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA
2010 Tianhe-IA 2.566 PFLOPS National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, China
2011 Fujitsu K computer 10.51 PFLOPS RIKEN, Kobe, Japan
2012 IBM Sequoia 16.32 PFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2012 Cray Titan 17.59 PFLOPS Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA
2013 NUDT Tianhe-2 33.86 PFLOPS Guangzhou, China

What strides do you guys and gals see us making in the future? Will things like die shrinking be a factor? Will I be able to roam about in Avatar-like settings in my lifetime, GAF? Would love to see your estimates for future consoles.

Teraflop this thread if the topic's been covered or if it's uninteresting.

 

[luca_29_bg]

2013 NUDT Tianhe-2 33.86 PFLOPS Guangzhou, China

This can run crysis ?

 

[Firmus_Anguis]

2013 NUDT Tianhe-2 33.86 PFLOPS Guangzhou, China

This can run crysis ?

Yeah, but only in 720p... and 20-30 fps.

 

[Systolique]

I wish I had technical knowledge on this kind of topic, and I really hope someone who does can provide some answers in the thread, this is super interesting !

 

[Blizzard]

I don't know much about supercomputers, but it is interesting. A quick Google suggests the NVIDIA GTX 1080 has about 9 TFLOPS of computing power...so a system with that could reach 2000-2001 supercomputer levels, perhaps?

 

[HanzSnubSnub]

I don't know too much about supercomputers, but I do believe the FLOPS measurement is a measure of their CPU power, whereas the PS4 FLOPS measurement is of the GPU.

Considering they are both very different machines, it's hard to accurately compare them. With that being said, theoretically your statement is correct. The PS4 GPU has the performance of a 1997-1999 supercomputer.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Its a decently interesting topic..Machines have gotten more advanced every single year since the 50s


Just remember that FLOPS are hard to quantify in any scenario, as there are different metrics for them across architectures, types of components and whatnot.

 

[Pestilence11]

Wasn't this the one thing the Cell processor excelled at? Not super computer standards but pretty impressive for its time.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Wasn't this the one thing the Cell processor excelled at? Not super computer standards but pretty impressive for its time.

The US military actually made a Super Computer out of over 1000 PS3's back when it launched

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

 

[lucebuce12]

The US military actually made a Super Computer out of over 1000 PS3's back when it launched

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

Always thought it was funny that the Japanese made an American Military Supercomputer.

 

[c0de]

Well, you Can't just compare raw numbers. First, supercomputers are often “shared“ computers with many nodes so often you don't have a single application using all the power the system has. Also the nodes all have huge amounts of memory and very fast interconnects to communicate to each other. Their basic design is completely different to a console and also the ps4 number is the theoretical maximum of the chip and not what you'll get in computing performance in an actual game.
Supercomputers have their performance tested with benchmarks from SPEC (at least that is how it was) and I didn't see this for ps4.

 

[c0de]

Wasn't this the one thing the Cell processor excelled at? Not super computer standards but pretty impressive for its time.

Actually there were supercomputers from IBM in the top 500 list but not for long. And afair not the cell used in ps3 but a more advanced version.

 

[wazoo]

Most Super computer run in double precision, something console hardly do - they only deal with single precison - because most 3D graphics computation do not need them. In that sense, double precision FLOPS on home systems are much worse.

As you can see here, precision vs speed.

http://nicolas.limare.net/pro/notes/2014/12/16_math_speed/

Super computer can do both, because the kind of application (nuclear plants, biology, etc)
require it.

For GPU, Nvidia has both professional and consumer lines with very different single/double perfs.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

Many supercomputers or components of them are purpose built, quite different to consoles built for gaming and the FLOPS comparison is just a unified metric to somewhat compare them. Consoles suit some limited supercomputer tasks but not others, basic comparisons can be made occasionally but more often than not consoles aren't well suited to supercomputer tasks or processing types specifically.

 

[SneakyStephan]

It's cpu tflops, and it's double precision as others have said

So no, not even close