Estimates put the processing power of an iPhone 5 at at around 2.7x times that of the Cray 2[2]
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/08/supercomputing_vs_ho...
[2] http://pages.experts-exchange.com/processing-power-compared/
I'll link the url when I've scanned my bookmarks.
psedit: look at jojomonkeyboy's comment http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/the-80s-super... he says an i7 2600 (not an i3) has less sustained compute power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP "The Cray-2, a completely new design, was introduced 1985. A very different compact four-processor design with from 64 MW (megaword) to 512 MW (512 MB to 4 GB) of main memory, it was specified to 500 MFLOPS but was slower than the X-MP on certain calculations due to its high memory latency.
The X-MP-succeeding Cray Y-MP series was announced in 1988; it also had a new design, replacing the 16-gate ECL gate arrays with a more compact VLSI gate array with larger circuit boards. It was a major improvement of the X-MP supporting up to eight processors."
Note latency is huge for these systems meaning for most workloads modern cellphones absolutely crush them.
Mainframes in general too.
I'm currently listening to Soul of a New Machine.
Mainframes are great, already using almost[0] memory safe systems programming language on the 60's with Burroughs, followed by IBM and a few other vendors.
Virtualization and containers with the 360.
Bytecode as universal binary format with JIT/AOT at kernel level, DB based file system, System/38 and AS/400.
Object based OS, AS/400.
[0] - They still have the issue of leaks and double free though, but everything else is safe Algol style with explicit unsafe blocks/modules required.
I also find it kind of amusing that IBM, a primarily consulting company, developed AS/400, given that part of its sales pitch is that integrated database requires no maintenance and you can forget entirely about your IBM i and just leave it running for a decade.
It's a neat system. I wish I had the opportunity to use one. In many ways it feels like we're still catching up to what System/38 was doing in 1979.
That would be a great read.
My favorite Cray tidbit: for fun, Seymour Cray dug tunnels underneath his home, and had a lot of his breakthroughs while doing so.
he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel:
"While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
"Seymour Cray was a man of few words. I was there for three weeks before I realized he was not the janitor."
So, if this was linear, we can all expect 130 petaflop computers around 2043 for around $3,500?
Lots of caveats here though, things aren't usually as linear as all this, and this is very much a back-of-a-napkin calculation.
Given that Moore's Law is creaking I wouldn't expect pocket petaflops any time soon. I'd expect a serious outbreak of cloudy clusters everywhere, and perhaps a dynamically reconfigurable Internet 2.0 with completely transparent non-localised computation.
This might change if computing finally goes optical and/or quantum. But if we're pushing electrons around wires, current hardware is close to the physical limits. The only way to speed it up is to build a lot more of it and speed up the connections.