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True. Because it was designed for this kind of tasks.

That is true for almost every specialised hardware.

On the other hand, take a GPU fitted to the graphics card of your desktop. I suspect it will outperform Cray in this kind of task. Especially if one takes price into account.

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GPUs (i.e. Nvidia and AMD/ATI) are the linear descendants of these supercomputers. Today's standard GPU's have vector processing units with fixed pipelines optimized for graphics operations.

Glen Miranker and Jon Rubenstein of Ardent made their way to Apple where they spec'd/designed the Velocity Engine that went into the PowerPC G4/5. It had a 128-bit vector execution unit that required the use of the AltiVec API.

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