Compare the 36 MFLOPS of the CDC 7600 with a home pc of today (2009):
Say an 'old' Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 CPU, which typically runs at a clock frequency
in excess of 2 GHz and provides computational performance in the range of a few GFLOPS.
True, even some video game consoles of the late 1990s and early 2000s,
such as the Gamecube and Dreamcast, has performances in excess of one GFLOPS.

Following the CDC7600, the original supercomputer, the Cray-1, was set up at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976.
The Cray-1 was capable of 80 MFLOPS (or, according to another source, 138 - 250 MFLOPS).


October 2009

www.simonlaub.net

Pics from visit to the Computer Museum, Mountain View, CA. - Visible Storage display items.