Clearly there are cheaper computers other than apple, so I'm using it for comparison to give the raspberry pi more chance to stand out in power.
But yeah, I made a bad comparison. First, you can actually have an apple macbook pro 2.7Ghz i7 for 2.5k, I was picking a top configuration model to compare to the price of this super-computer made of Pis, but the processing power would be the same, and it is a notebook and not a tower. So I guess the best way to compare the cost of this raspberry super computer to an apple cost like machine is the Mac Pro, which is a tower, and for around 4k you'd get two 6-core 2.4Ghz intel Xeon. And then 16GB of ram and 1TB HD, juts like the pi Super Computer. Now, these are actually old machines that haven't been properly updated, by the way.
Anyway, Hey, I didn't know anything about this Xeon Phi, it sound awesome. But I figure it was designed for supercomputing tasks, which I also know nothing about, and now I'm also very curious to know what kind of computer music process you can have with this kind of thing.
But my doubt remains, would the raspberry supercomputer be more powerful than this Mac Pro?
And if you say you can have a Xeon Phi Super Computer for 4 grand. Well, it seems it would be more powerful than 64 Pis together, right?
thanks
Alex
2012/9/16 Charles Henry
<czhenry@gmail.com>
On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Alexandre Torres Porres
<
porres@gmail.com> wrote:
> now my question is;
>
> spending 4k to build a Pi supercomputer can give you more power and
> possibilities than with a top of the line MAC for example (which will cost
> just as much, and be a quad core 2.7 intel i7, 1.6GHz bus, 16GB Ram).
a desktop instead. It has 50 cores and a 512-bit instruction word
length on each core.
> I'm guessing that CPU wize it would be more powerful indeed; even thought
> it's a modest one, that's 64 cores against 4...
>
> what I'm not familiar to is how supercomputing works and optimizes the work
> by splitting it into all CPU units. Maybe it does work like getting hard
> drives into RAID 0 mode, right? Where the speed of file transfer does double
> up.
You have to write software with MPI (for clustering) or OpenMP
(massively multi-threaded) to take advantage of those extra cores.
You always lose some efficiency when using multiple cores, but you may
speedup the program. The highest possible speedup is achieved when
all processes are independent.
>
> cheers
> Alex
>
> 2012/9/16 i go bananas <
hard.off@gmail.com>
>>
>> yeah, separating individual instruments / voices from a mix does seem like
>> a 'just over the horizon' application. I'd love to be able to have a stereo
>> microphone in the room i'm in now, and separate the sound of the rain, the
>> wind, the TV in the background, my typing at this keyboard....
>>
>
>