OK, so I'm about to say something which is neither new nor original. But 
here goes.



This...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Cray2.jpeg

...is a Cray-2 supercomputer. It's a quad-core 244 MHz system with 2GB 
RAM. Depending on which benchmark you ask, it generates about 1.9 GFLOPS 
peak performance. It takes up 16 square feet of floor space and weighs 
5500 pounds. It eats 195 kW of electricity, and it's liquid-cooled. (Not 
water though - God no! It's CFCs.) It's hard to find definitive numbers, 
but it appears to have originally been sold for something like 16 
million USD. That's roughly 32 million in 2010 USD.

On the other hand, this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RaspberryPi.jpg

...is a Respberry Pi. It's a circuit board that fits in your pocket, and 
costs less than a meal for two at a cheap restaurant. It's sold as a toy 
for children to play with - a cheap, disposable computer.

It's GPU alone generates 24 GFLOPS. I have no idea what the CPU puts out.

This is powered using nothing more than the 900 mA that a USB cable can 
supply. (~3.5W, apparently.) It doesn't even have a heat sink, let alone 
fans. If you put it on the ground, it takes up approximately 0.049737 
square feet, not including USB cable. And you *can* actually run useful 
computations with just that. (Although you'd need to plug in some more 
wires to set it running in the first place...)

It might be a little bit of a stretch to say that a Raspberry Pi is as 
powerful as 24 Cray-2 supercomputers. (After all, the Cray-2 has 2GB 
RAM, while the Raspberry Pi has a rather disappointing 0.5GB.) But 
seriously... THIS IS A TOY!

We are living in the future, gentlemen. The future is here, right now. 
And we're living in it.

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