What an over-the-hill supercomputer looked like in 2000:
'16 vector processors, each capable of 1 GFLOPS performance, main memory amounting to 512 MegaWords (4GB), and a 512MW (4GB) Solid-state Storage Device (SSD) serving as an extension to memory. He comes with raid controllers and disks providing over 130GB of high-speed disk storage.'
I am again reminded that our industry is insane. That machine is not even a top-line laptop anymore.
Yes and no. If you compare memory capacity and GFLOPS, you will often find that those computers seem relatively unimpressive compared to what we have now. The value (and cost) in that hardware is often in capabilities and features that aren't necessarily reflected in numbers and bullet points.
If you were to take that machine and put it up against a 1 GFLOP desktop with the equivalent amount of RAM and disk storage, the Cray would annihilate it on the tasks that it was purchased for.
True. Because it was designed for this kind of tasks.
That is true for almost every specialised hardware.
On the other hand, take a GPU fitted to the graphics card of your desktop. I suspect it will outperform Cray in this kind of task. Especially if one takes price into account.
GPUs (i.e. Nvidia and AMD/ATI) are the linear descendants of these supercomputers. Today's standard GPU's have vector processing units with fixed pipelines optimized for graphics operations.
Glen Miranker and Jon Rubenstein of Ardent made their way to Apple where they spec'd/designed the Velocity Engine that went into the PowerPC G4/5. It had a 128-bit vector execution unit that required the use of the AltiVec API.
'16 vector processors, each capable of 1 GFLOPS performance, main memory amounting to 512 MegaWords (4GB), and a 512MW (4GB) Solid-state Storage Device (SSD) serving as an extension to memory. He comes with raid controllers and disks providing over 130GB of high-speed disk storage.'
I am again reminded that our industry is insane. That machine is not even a top-line laptop anymore.