Note that these measures are biased by bandwidth. CPUs today have massive peak FLOPS, but limited sustained bandwidth, while the Cray being designed with a very large one to ensure regular performance.
You are probably overestimating the Cray, modern CPU's have a lot of bandwidth. And due to being physically smaller fewer issues with latency, and fairly large on chip cache.
Someone did the math and a Cray was on par with an intel core i3 series (early gen) in sustained perf even though in terms of raw GFLOPS the intel cpu was two leagues above. That's all I'm saying.
That's not a Crey 2. That is talking about the X-MP it's successor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP "The Cray-2, a completely new design, was introduced 1985. A very different compact four-processor design with from 64 MW (megaword) to 512 MW (512 MB to 4 GB) of main memory, it was specified to 500 MFLOPS but was slower than the X-MP on certain calculations due to its high memory latency.
The X-MP-succeeding Cray Y-MP series was announced in 1988; it also had a new design, replacing the 16-gate ECL gate arrays with a more compact VLSI gate array with larger circuit boards. It was a major improvement of the X-MP supporting up to eight processors."
Note latency is huge for these systems meaning for most workloads modern cellphones absolutely crush them.
Mainframes are great, already using almost[0] memory safe systems programming language on the 60's with Burroughs, followed by IBM and a few other vendors.
Virtualization and containers with the 360.
Bytecode as universal binary format with JIT/AOT at kernel level, DB based file system, System/38 and AS/400.
Object based OS, AS/400.
[0] - They still have the issue of leaks and double free though, but everything else is safe Algol style with explicit unsafe blocks/modules required.
Talk about a commitment to backwards compatibility – you can run binaries built 30 years ago for god knows what proprietary processor on a modern POWER8 system without recompiling.
I also find it kind of amusing that IBM, a primarily consulting company, developed AS/400, given that part of its sales pitch is that integrated database requires no maintenance and you can forget entirely about your IBM i and just leave it running for a decade.
It's a neat system. I wish I had the opportunity to use one. In many ways it feels like we're still catching up to what System/38 was doing in 1979.
I was responsible for doing backups on a AS/400 during a Summer internship in the early 90's. Sadly did not do much more than exchanging the tapes, logging in and starting the backup.
> "Wish there was a good book about the history of crays. It's the kind of thing you hear talked about but are unlikely to ever see."
That would be a great read.
My favorite Cray tidbit: for fun, Seymour Cray dug tunnels underneath his home, and had a lot of his breakthroughs while doing so.
he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel:
"While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
For many services the phone is just a relatively dumb front end, and the actual computing happens on cloudy clusters elsewhere.
Given that Moore's Law is creaking I wouldn't expect pocket petaflops any time soon. I'd expect a serious outbreak of cloudy clusters everywhere, and perhaps a dynamically reconfigurable Internet 2.0 with completely transparent non-localised computation.
This might change if computing finally goes optical and/or quantum. But if we're pushing electrons around wires, current hardware is close to the physical limits. The only way to speed it up is to build a lot more of it and speed up the connections.
I think it's speeding up. 1975 Cray-1 had approximately same 160 MFlops as first iphone had. And it was 32 years between them. So, probably we'll have 130 petaflops around 2033-2035? :)