Ah, let us remember the days of yore, when we had to spend millions of dollars to get the power that we can get now for less than $25,000. Go back through history with me:
- The Cray-1, from 1976
- Cost: $8.8 million dollars
- Speed: 16 megaflops (that is, 16 times one million floating-point operations per second)
- Source: http://www.cray.com/about_cray/history.html
- The Cray Y-MP, from 1988
- Cost: $40 million in 1991
- Speed: 4.3 gigaflops (that is, 4.3 times one billion floating-point operations per second)
- Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/15/yourmoney/msft.php
- The new MacPro with eight cores
- Cost: maxed out, no more than $25,000
- Speed: estimated, but we'll guess 41 gigaflops (41 times 1 billion floating-point operations per second)
- Source: http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn111406-story01.html
You gotta love the advance of technology.
