On: A supercomputer at home

[biohacker42]

Supercomputers at home will be common soon. Intel is going the road of multi-core, I'm typing this on a machine with two 4 core CPUs. Soon we'll have not just 8 but 16 and then 64, etc, cores in a sub $2K machine you can buy from Dell or HP or who ever.

[MaysonL → biohacker42]

Well, for a few grand, you can get a TeraOPS development board with a 336 core chip from Ambric. The chip at the heart of it is only a couple hundred (quantity 1000).

[gaius → biohacker42]

Arguably supercomputers at home are common, and have been for years. How does your machine stack up against a Cray Y-MP?

(That Cray got 330 megaflops/core, Macs are peaking at around 1400 - each with 8).

[wmf → gaius]

The term "supercomputer" becomes meaningless unless its definition is periodically revised. IMO these days you need over 1 TFLOPS to quality.