Technology. An ever-changing beast! So much so, that the sinfully thin iPad 2 packs the same power as the jumbo-sized four-processor version of the Cray 2, a supercomputer, which was the world’s faster computer in 1985.
But duh! 1985 was a helluva long time ago, it’s sorta expected that we’d be moving at that pace. But what is really amazing is that we’ve shrunk the power of a supercomputer that was, according to the New York Times, “about the size of a large washing machine” and “cooled by immersion in a liquid called Flourinert that had been developed by 3M, and that was occasionally used as a human blood substitute during surgery” into something no bigger than a paper pad.
And they’ve only benchmarked one core of the iPad 2, when they test both, they expect the iPad 2 to rival the supercomputers through 1994. [NY Times Bits]
Image credit: Cray Supercomputers