Invisible wrote:
> Hell, if I had any clue how much performance a current CPU delivers, I'd 
> know if these numbers are impressive or not! ;-)

Well, consider that a current CPU runs at some small multiple[1] of 3GHz, 
and it's unlikely to do more than some small multiple[2] of FLOPs per clock 
cycle, it sounds pretty fast to me.  I suspect the difference between "peak" 
and "sustained" for both is going to be based on how fast you can feed them 
numbers from RAM.

What I think is a cool factoid is that Intel (or IBM?) is advertising they 
have a petaflop processor. Consider the early 70's mainframes, like the ones 
that ran the Apollo missions to the moon[3]. Give three of those to each 
person on Earth, and you have about a petaflop. :-) Pretty awesome.



[1] Depending on the number of cores, for example.
[2] Depending on the SIMD width of SSE/MMX/etc instructions.
[3] Like the Sigma Scientific Data Processor X560 I used when first learning 
to program. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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