TeraFLOPS Processing Power

The first computer to surpass 1 teraFLOPS of processing power was the Sandia National Laboratories’ ASCI Red supercomputer in 1997 (pictured above), which—in its final configuration—made use of 9,298 Pentium II processors in more than 100 cabinets, and occupied an extremely large room (about 2,500 square feet).

Today, the Radeon 4870 HD board also offers more than 1 teraFLOPS (1 trillion Floating-point Operations Per Second) of processing power.

The ASCI Red required about 500kW of power to operate and another 500kW of power for cooling (for a total of about 1 million watts of power). The 4870 has a maximum power requirement of 160W.

“We’re getting the same capability of processing power a little more than 10 years later in an easily attainable format,” Baumann says.