Comments on: How many MIPS is Honeyball holding?

By: Mr, A .Wake.

Mr, A .Wake. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:22:38 +0000

You do know that The Roswell ‘incident’ occurred on or about July 8, 1947 and was initially ‘exposed’ by Major Jesse Marcel. I think the first poster is hinting that after the recovery of alien technology the planets total MIPS was a lot larger than was publicly admitted or believed.

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:20:19 +0000

I remember booting VAXes off tiny tape cartridges! this was the period when the disk controller subsystem test program played chess with you (because it was a complete PDP-11). The idea that all the world’s TFlops might produce nothing more interesting than Twitter, was a long way away back then…!

By: milliganp

milliganp — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:09:56 +0000

I’d be happy to guess something in the late 70’s or early 80’s. The Vax was the machine that defined Mips (they used to be called VAX mips). In 1978 DEC were building less than 1000 VAX systems per year -and that was the most powerful minicomputer available. IBM s370’s were capable of 20-30 MIPS, but those sold in hundreds of units a year so the two biggest manufactures together were probaly shipping less than 20,000 mips per year. The wafer probably does 2+ million mips -up to 100x the total worlwide computer production in the mid 70’s.
Moore’s law has brought us a long way!

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:27:58 +0000

This seemed to me like a question for Wolfram Alpha. It snootily says that Gflops and “megainstructions per second” are not compatible units, presumably because a floating point op may require a variable number of instructions… so maybe MIPS is the wrong unit. Taking Ian’s late night maths as a starting point, I found this: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/talks/singapore_public.pdf and page 10 suggests the year 2000!

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:48:02 +0000

I worked for Intel until 12 weeks ago and it is amazing how blaze you get about wafers, chips etc.

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:21:24 +0000

Nothing like a bit of late-night maths:

Assume 300mm diameter wafer, 261mm^2 die. Wikipedia formula gives maximum dies on the wafe to be ~230, so lets take 90% ish of that – 205

Information at this time of night is sketchy, but lets guess (again) at 48 GFlops per die (seems to be low-end for the beefiest 45nm xeons).

So ~9.8 TFlops, or there about.

(Sorry couldn’t find xeon scores in Mips)

By: Jesse Marcel

Jesse Marcel — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:14:31 +0000

Early in the morning of July 8th 1947 would be my guess the total number of MIPS for the entire planet.