A 1985 Supercomputer Fits in Your Pocket
Dollars per billion calculations a second, 1961 to today, to scale: from ~$18B of hardware to roughly one cent — computing got more than a trillion times cheaper, and the GPU step is what made the AI boom economically possible.
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Used For
Credit
Source
01Cray-2 supercomputer (hook + thumbnail)
RamaCray-2 IMG 9142.jpg / CC BY-SA 3.0 FR
03Commodity compute cluster
MEGWARE Computer GmbHMEGWARE.CLIC.jpg / CC BY-SA 3.0
04Graphics card, NVIDIA RIVA 128
Timothy BorkowskiGraphics Card Diamond Viper 330 with Nvidia (RIVA 128) GPU.jpg / CC BY-SA 3.0
Data sources & references
01Cost-of-computing series (peak FLOPS / hardware price, landmark machines) — compiled table, Wikipedia "FLOPS"; cross-checked to machine spec sheets
02Cray-2 specs and price — Wikipedia "Cray-2"
03Modern phone GPU anchor — Apple A18 Pro, ~2.6 TFLOPS single-precision