Friday, July 04, 2003
Are today's PCs more powerful than the legendary supercomputers of the 1970s?
...The power of a supercomputer is commonly measured in "flops," which stands for floating point operations per second. The Cray-1, the most famous early supercomputer (the first model was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976), was capable of 133 megaflops (133 million flops). Early versions weighed over five tons, had a clock speed of 80 MHz, featured the equivalent of 8 MB of RAM, and cost about $9 million. In 1985 the Cray-2 was introduced, which could do 1.9 gigaflops (1.9 billion flops), operated at 244 MHz, had the equivalent of 2GB of RAM, and cost about $12 million. For comparison, a typical PC bought in 2000 or 2001 uses a Pentium 4 processor with a clock speed of 1.5 GHz, benchmarks at around 1.8 Gflops, probably cost under $2,000, and fits under your desk. In short, it's the rough equivalent of a 1985 supercomputer for one-six thousandth the cost....