Cray 1 Review

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For those into retro computing here is a great bit of nostalgia, a 1979 Popular Science review of Seymour Cray‘s Cray-1 SuperComputer.

Incredible Cray-1 cruises at 80 million operations a second

At US $8,000,000 that was $100K per MIP, or 17 MegaFlops per US$1M1. :-)

As the introduction to the blog post says, “a Pentium 4 2.8ghz can hit about 2.5 GFLOP/s“, or just under 20 times the speed. For some reason I’m reminded of Ozymandias.


  1. it was rated around 250 MFlops, but that was with very tuned code, usually it could do about 136 Mflops according to the Wikipedia article [back]

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