> The M4 Max MacBook I'm using to write this would've ranked among the 50 fastest supercomputers on Earth in 2009.
I attempted to validate this: You'd need >75 TFlop/s to get into the top50 in the TOP500[0] rankings in 2009. M4 Max review says 18.4 TFlop/s at FP32, but TOP500 uses LINPACK, which uses FP64 precision.
An M2 benchmark gives a 1:4 ratio for double precision, so you'd get maybe 9 TFlop/s at FP64? That wouldn't make it to TOP500 in 2009.
> Now multiply that by thousands of concurrent connections each doing multiple I/O operations. Servers spent ~95% of their time waiting for I/O operations.
Well, no. The particular thread of execution might have been spending 95% of time waiting for I/O, but a server (the machine serving the thousands of connections) would easily run at 70%-80% of CPU utilization (because above that, tail latency starts to suffer badly). If your server had 5% CPU utilization under full load, you were not running enough parallel processes, or did not install enough RAM to do so.
Well, it's a technicality, but the post is devoted to technicalities, and such small blunders erode the trust to the rest of the post. (I'm saying this as a fan of Bun.)
If you’ve never seen a machine stuck waiting for disk I/O, I don’t know what to tell you… but it is common, even with SSDs it can happen (as they point out due to handoff between the OS and user level process takes time)
I’ve talked to hundreds of humans online and only see that pattern once in a blue moon. In fact I just went thru the last 10 pages of my comments (and their replies, etc) and grepped for the phrase and the only time it’s been uttered has been in AI response examples like above.
> even low-end smartphones have more RAM than high-end servers had in 2009
That's even less accurate. By two orders of magnitude. High-end servers in 2009 had way more than 4GB. The (not even high-end) HP Proliant I installed for a small business in 2008, that was already bought used at the time, had 128GB of RAM.
I understand why one would want to make an article entertaining but that seriously makes me doubt the rest of the articles when diving into a topic I don't know as much.
I attempted to validate this: You'd need >75 TFlop/s to get into the top50 in the TOP500[0] rankings in 2009. M4 Max review says 18.4 TFlop/s at FP32, but TOP500 uses LINPACK, which uses FP64 precision.
An M2 benchmark gives a 1:4 ratio for double precision, so you'd get maybe 9 TFlop/s at FP64? That wouldn't make it to TOP500 in 2009.
[0]: https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2009/06/