Consider the Cray-1 supercomputer of the early 1980s - 100 MFLOPS for US$10M. A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks.
> A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks.
Yes. A slight correction, though: 100 GFLOPS per CPU core.
Some new server Xeons can do 64 single precision FLOPS per cycle per core. Most other modern x86 CPUs can do up to 32 SP FLOPS per cycle per core.
AFAIK, RPi4's Cortex A72 will have to do with just 8 FLOPS/cycle/core. Similar to original Intel Core, Nehalem and Penryn. FPU wise (and probably otherwise as well), per clock cycle, RPi4 is not far from the famous Core 2 Quad Q6600. :-)
Or one Cortex A72 core @1.5 GHz has comparable floating point performance as a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 6 GHz.
(These figures count one FPU multiply-add as two FLOPS, but that seems to be industry standard way...)
With the right amount of drinks, I'd argue that architecturally a Cray1 is "spiritually closer" to a modern video card that a CPU... So you can get 4-5 teraflops for ~$500 that way...
