I assume that Cray was talking about a uniprocessor, not SMP. Besides, it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster against EC2's shared-nothing cluster.
There is a -limited- market for 'real' supercomputers, and with that I mean computers that have been geared towards a special class of problems. They too exist in SMP versions, but it would be a serious mistake to think of the individual machines in those arrays as comparable to a machine in a run-of-the-mill beowulf arrangement:
The reason these machines still have a right to an existence is because not all problems are solvable in a massively parallel fashion. Some parallelization may be possible, but the speed up from such rearranging of the problem has an upper limit. That's where these machines come in to their own.
Cray didn't make uniprocessors. The reason his supercomputers were faster (and why Cray Computer Corporation is still a darn good supercomputer company) were advances in moving data among lots of processors.
