alt Hacker NewsOpening paragraph:
> The Cray Research, Inc. CRAY-1 Computer System is a large-scale, general-purpose digital computer featuring vector as well as scalar processing, a 12.5 nanosecond clock period, and a 50 nanosecond memory cycle time. The CRAY-1 is capable of executing over 80 million floating point operations per second.
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance.
That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.