That reminds me of the joke about the A7 in the iPhone being faster than the old PowerPC cores in the G5s, which wasn't the first time that a phone's processor beat an older laptop's, but the first time that the comparison was Apple's to Apple's. Terrible pun, but it happened in what, a 5 year span?
I play the same game, and I love it (no one ever believes me about it, either).
Ah, no, you're correct! I had originally misremembered the statement (going with G4 and laptop), and forgot to change the word laptop to desktop when I switched it to the G5. That was totally my bad.
My desktop, that I pieced together in 2011, has more computing power (including the GPU) than the fastest supercomputer in 1999 (~3 TFLOPS for GPU+CPU perf).
If you have some cash burning a hole in your pocket, you can piece together a ~10 TFLOP machine today entirely from NewEgg without doing anything too fancy.
Are you sure about that? The TOP500 list uses the linpack benchmark to measure double-precision FLOPS. The numbers you cite for your machine sound more like those you would get with single-precision.
For comparision, the GTX Titan can do about 1.5 TFLOPS in double-precision and about 3.2 TFLOPS in single-precision doing GEMM.
I play the same game, and I love it (no one ever believes me about it, either).