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What's the highest cost vs computing power ever asked?

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jwet:
There's an Apollo Guidance computer on Sotheby's - estimated between $200-300K.  Speed .043 Mhz!  If the metric is dollars per MHz, that's almost $7M/Mhz.

Link
https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/space-exploration/apollo-guidance-computer

macboy:
ENIAC performed 0.005 MIPS at a cost of around USD $400000 (ca. 1943). The equivalent purchasing power today is about USD $7.1M
So that's $1.4B/MIPS accounting for inflation or a still rather impressive $80M/MIPS without. By contrast, a year or two ago I replaced the very old CPUs in my PC with slightly less old ones, two XEON E5-2667v2. These are 3.6 GHz with 8 cores. The seller asked, and I paid US$20 each. Intel's export compliance documentation lists the performance of this model at 211 GFLOPS. That is a cost of ~$0.0001/MIPS (MFLOPS technically, but I'll just wave my hands around and equate the two figures for this purpose). If we equate the $ value of one XEON "FLOPS" to one ENIAC "calculation per second" then we could declare that ENIAC was about 15 trillion times as expensive as a "modern" 2nd hand CPU.

The Charles Babbage Differencing Engine was a mechanical computer (though maybe not Turing complete?). A good reference I found on Quora seems to be from a professor at Stanford University who operated and maintained a working copy of it. He claims about 1 calculation (high precision addition) per second throughput. The British government spent 17000 pounds between 1823 and 1846 building an incomplete version of it. That's very roughly US$1M in today's money according to google, but I suspect that estimate is low (over two decades of research and fabrication!), and more money would be needed to complete it. Even going with that low-ball estimate, that's US$1M for 1 calculation per second, or US$1Trillion/MIPS. That's 1e16 or 10 quadrillion times as expensive as my used XEON CPU from ebay.

brucehoult:

--- Quote from: macboy on March 11, 2024, 02:56:23 pm ---ENIAC performed 0.005 MIPS at a cost of around USD $400000 (ca. 1943). The equivalent purchasing power today is about USD $7.1M
So that's $1.4B/MIPS accounting for inflation or a still rather impressive $80M/MIPS without.

--- End quote ---

ENIAC was my immediate thought, if talking about electronic computers.

Although the customer (the US government) had bottomless pockets and wanted performance at any cost, I'd suspect that all successors gave better price/performance.


--- Quote ---The Charles Babbage Differencing Engine was a mechanical computer (though maybe not Turing complete?).

--- End quote ---

Certainly not!

Babbage's "Difference Engine No.1 1" was designed (but never completed) with seven registers each holding a 20 digit number.  The ONLY calculation it can do is:


--- Code: ---d5 += d6
d4 += d5
d3 += d4
d2 += d3
d1 += d2
d0 += d1
print d0

--- End code ---

This allows calculating and printing successive values of an up to 6th order polynomial by setting up appropriate initial values in each register.

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