
The golden gigaflop: Apple’s shrinking performance sweet spot - pavlov
https://medium.com/@pauli/the-golden-gigaflop-apple-s-shrinking-performance-sweet-spot-e1be50ff88d7#.hwfk1tg9d
======
Tloewald
As I recall, Apple supposedly bought a Cray to simulate the 68030, and the
apocryphal story is that someone announced to Cray that Apple had just bought
one of his computers to help them design their next computer, to which he
replied, "that's funny, I just bought one of their computers to help design my
next computer". By the time this happened, Jobs would likely have been running
NeXT (the first NeXT Cube shipped with a 68030).

Also, the article mentions Clayton Christensen's _The Innovator 's Dilemma_
focussing specifically on his disk drive manufacturer story, which was already
outdated and wrong when he first published it (the "disrupted" companies went
on to dominate and extinguish their "disruptors").

~~~
pavlov
Interesting -- I honestly didn't know that about Christensen's disk drive
study. (I read the book ages ago and haven't kept up with the debate...)

I'd be happy to update the article with a link to discussion about the disk
drive studies being wrong.

~~~
srunni
I'm not sure what discussion the OP was referring to, but there was a recent
publication in the MIT Sloan Management Review:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-
clay-c...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-
christensen-get-disruption-wrong-)

[http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-useful-is-the-
theory-...](http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-useful-is-the-theory-of-
disruptive-innovation/)

------
jedberg
> 20MB was quite a lot of space in the eighties!

Yes it was! I remember in 86/87, when I upgraded my original IBM PC from
having two 5.25" floppies to having one floppy and a 40MB hard drive. All of a
sudden my word processor, with 11 floppies, could be loaded on the drive and I
didn't have to switch disks to spell check and it opened in seconds instead of
minutes!

Back then the upgrade from two floppies to one floppy and a hard disk was way
bigger than going from spinning disk to SSD (and that was a huge jump too)

~~~
captaincrowbar
A few years ago I had my mind slightly boggled when I realised that the new
computer I'd just bought had exactly one million times as much storage as the
first computer I ever owned (Amiga 500 with 5 MB -> Mac Pro with 5 TB).

~~~
pkroll
My first computer had 4K RAM, 4K ROM BASIC (TRS-80 Model I). Your Amiga (and
mine) seemed like a spaceship next to that Model I.

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TorbjornLunde
According to John Sculley’s in the book Points of View a tribute to Alan Kay,
Apple invested in Cray hardware in order to simulate what the computing power
of a desktop 10 years ahead would be and what kind of possibilities it would
offer.

 _In 1987, Apple also invested in a Cray XMP 48 super computer which enabled
our engineers to experiment with what real time manipulation of
multidimensional objects on a screen would look and feel like many years
before such computational power would be available on general purpose personal
computers._

You can buy the book or download a PDF of it for free here:
[http://vpri.org/pov/](http://vpri.org/pov/)

------
filabrazilska
It's not a gigaflop but a gigaflops and the flops part of it doesn't stand for
a floating operation but floating operation per second.

~~~
mikeash
Do you also write "two gigaflopses"?

~~~
letstryagain
One floating point operation per second

One flops

Two giga- floating point operations per second

Two gigaflops

~~~
mikeash
Acronyms get pluralized separately from their contents, though. You wouldn't
say "two CPU" or "two SSD" or "two taser."

~~~
Spivak
But you would add an 's' to both of your examples to make two central
processing units (CPUs) and two solid state drives (SSDs). I agree, it's a
weird rule but it certainly sounds better.

When the pluralization happens in the middle of the acronym it becomes weird
-- one FLOPS, two FLOPsS?

~~~
mikeash
Both of my three examples?

Anyway, you're right, they would all get an S at the end either way.

A better example would be "captcha." You'd say "two captchas," not "two
captcha" or "two captscha."

For a less polite example that works the same way, consider MILF.

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pervycreeper
>The iPad makes a somewhat distracting bump in that chart. If we ignore the
years and just swap the iPhone and iPad, we get this rather tidy logarithmic
curve instead

It would have been more honest and accurate just to have discarded the point
for the ipad.

~~~
pavlov
The point is that the iPad fills a slot on the logarithmic volume curve almost
exactly between the PowerBook and the iPhone -- it was just released "out of
order".

I'll edit the sentence to make this more clear.

~~~
ISL
This is a dangerous road to travel. Any dataset can be reordered to yield a
monotonic result.

~~~
pavlov
Certainly. But in this case it makes sense to reorder the dataset by
descending physical volume, because the nearly constant multiplier between the
steps becomes apparent.

~~~
Someone
Once you allow that, you can put anything in that graph. For example, that
jump in the graph between the Cray and the AlphaServer calls for a product of
around 3 cubic meters. I conclude that the Apple car will be more like a
people mover than a car :-)

~~~
watmough
But the interesting thing, is that the iPad was created _before_ the iPhone,
and shelved to make way for the iPhone, so I'd say the modified graph reflects
if not the release order, at least the order of innovation.

------
mmastrac
This is a very Kurzweil-esque look at computing, even though narrowly focused
at Apple. Extrapolating exponential progress yields some interesting
predictions.

------
mwcremer
Apple's Cray was purple, called "tma1" due its resemblance to the Monolith,
and my understanding is that it was used for flow modeling of injection
moulding for Macintosh II series cases.

------
vessenes
pavlov, This is a super interesting way to think about computing devices from
Apple. If I think about two orders of magnitude down, I get to maybe an
earring; some sort of wearable terminal, a-la Ian Banks' Culture series. We've
had glasses already, although they kind of suck.

It's an extremely cool idea to start thinking about making an interface with a
gigaflop budget and a size estimate. You didn't hit on it, but there are
bandwidth budgets that generally follow a curve as well. I'm not sure what the
curve is, but it's probably straight-ish (up) on a logarithmic graph.

So if I combine a gigaflop in an earring with 1gigabit of low energy wireless,
what do I get for an interface, or use cases?

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mtw
I wish Apple focuses instead on bigger hardware (mac server, mac pros) for
scientific computing and video/graphic applications. Professionals like the
Apple GUI but if you can't find a machine with a good nvidia card, many will
just have to jump to another platform

~~~
Gravityloss
I don't think they would make sense for production use.

Maybe instead Apple could do a commercial GUI on top of a "proper" Linux core.

Now the production stuff that runs on Linux anyway, sorta kinda works on mac
for local development most of the time, with Homebrew etc.. (Homebrew is
great, I just installed ag today, I think it even compiled it from source)

There aren't much real alternatives to Linux for servers, but there are to
macs for desktop. Business people are using Windows anyway, and technical
people could switch to Linux if they can forgo Office. They would need
professional Linux support though.

Or then Apple could help create a good package system.

~~~
jonhohle
Why would you want an Apple GUI on headless hardware? Apple seems content to
run Linux for their web servers[0]. Pixar, when still majority owned by Steve
Jobs, used Linux for its render farms[1].

Before Steve Jobs returned, Apple was working on MkLinux[2], but that effort
seemed to fizzle out, and it seemed like in later years, the idea of using
Linux as a starting point was a non-starter[3]. Even Airport devices typically
have run either VxWorks or - more recently - NetBSD.

0 -
[http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fap...](http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.com)
1 -
[http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Pixar_Big_on_Linux_Cl...](http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Pixar_Big_on_Linux_Clusters_-
_Mac_Not_so_Much_) 2 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux)
3 - [http://www.wired.com/2008/11/the-iphone-
coul/](http://www.wired.com/2008/11/the-iphone-coul/)

~~~
Gravityloss
I meant the opposite - Linux for my Macbook.

------
Scramblejams
"The Power Mac G4 Cube was an outright failure."

 _sniff_

My favorite PC design ever, so sad. RIP!

