TODAY'S NETBOOK, YESTERDAY'S HPC

摘要

By 1970s' standards, an average desktop or notebook computer available from Best Buy or Fry's today would be a supercomputer. The computing titan of the time, Cray 1, was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a speed of 80MHz, executing 160 million floating-point operations per second (160 megaflops) with 8MB of memory. By contrast, today's HP Mini 110 (a netbook) in the most basic configuration is powered by a 1.66GHz Intel Atom processor, with 1GB memory. The price is roughly $275.