[_delirium]

An interesting aspect is how much more slowely memory sizes have caught up. Today's laptops can crush a 90s supercomputer in GFlops, but are just now catching up to a mid-1990s Cray in main memory (4GB). I remember being fairly befuddled when I started college in 2000, and my CS dept's UltraSPARC servers were slower than my Pentium III in CPU, but had memory measured in a unit that I had only heard of being used for hard drive space.

[jerf]

A fair comparison though would have to be a modern Cray-class supercomputery thing to that Cray though. That's going to have more than 4GB of RAM; modern Cray equivalents open the bid at petabytes of RAM.

[_delirium]

Oh, I agree modern supercomputers beat 1995-era ones on all axes; it's mostly the different rates at which consumer-class computers catch up that are interesting. A modern MacBook Pro wipes the floor, CPU-wise, with a 1995 Cray, but only just matches it RAM-wise. So comparisons like "today's [consumer thing] is as good as [year's] [enterprise thing]" depend heavily on whether you're comparing them on CPU or RAM.

[aheilbut]

There are few, if any, current systems with petabytes of RAM; the very largest have tens to hundreds of terabytes.