i believe that to qualify as a supercomputer, a machine must be able to perform a gigaflop (one billion floating point operations in one second of time), which many, many consumer-level machines can do. so yeah, you're right, it's not that super by today's standards; perhaps they should redefine the term "supercomputer".
I don't think there is a standard definition of the the term. The
comp.sys.super
tries to give an answer, but it is a little squishy.
apple released a bunch of data about their dual-cpu machines claiming they can pump out 15 gigaflops. that's approximately 25% of what this cray is capable of. given current cheap computing performance, i don't see how cray will be able to make this machine appealing to anyone without making it really cheap. $10k? $8k?
It's true that the market for "old-school" supercomputers seems to be shrinking, but I think you're glossing over a lot of things when you make
the claim that a 2-head Mac has 25% of the capability of this computer. There is something to be said for memory size, memory bandwidth, and I/O bandwidth which don't figure in to your calculation. The Mac is unlikely approach 15 gigaflops except on a problem that fits in cache.
