In 1996, IBM’s ASCI Red was the top ranked supercomputer in the world. It was the first one that could do 1 Teraflop. A Teraflop means 1000000000000 floating point (think fractional math) operations per second. It was used to simulate nuclear explosions and such.
This week, AMD released the ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5870 can also do 1 Teraflop. This is a graphic chip for laptop computers. It will be used to draw millions of polygons per second depicting your simulated orgies and such.
This is Moore’s law to you. Thanks to CUDA Chess for the info.
