Microsoft Bob, version 8

[Steven P Jobs]

^ when did you buy it though? At the time the PowerMac G5 was on sale the only system I know of that could have done that amount of cores/memory per node would have been some outrageously expensive Itanium 2 cluster, or possibly some kind of SPARC-based system, though I don't know too much about those. Nowadays you can easily get these kinds of specs from x86, and other architectures have moved on to even more outrageous specs. Things have changed greatly over the last couple of years in that regard. I'd predict even more speed gains over the next few years, especially if people finally figure out how to really use GPUs to their full potential. Another trend I see over the next 5 years or so is a drastic decrease in power consumption. After all building a supercomputer is one thing, but then you have to keep it running. IIRC the one in Tianjin is water-cooled, just imagine the potential for failure with over 30k water-cooled CPUs.

The RIKEN/K Computer in Japan is 10x as fast as the fastest system from 3 years ago, and the trend seems to be continuing exponentially.