Thursday, 5 June 2008

Cost per gigFlOPS: REALLY cheap now!

I love this table (adapted from Wikipedia) on how the cost per gigaFLOPS has changed in the last 50 years or so:

Hardware costs:

* 1961: about US$1,100,000,000,000 ($1.1 trillion) per GFLOPS
* 1997: about US$30,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, April: $1,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, May: $640 per GFLOPS
* 2003, August: $82 per GFLOPS
* 2006, February: about $1 per GFLOPS
* 2007, March: about $0.42 per GFLOPS
* 2007, October: about $0.20 per GFLOPS (in a Sony PS3 console).

Imagine: we pay twenty cents today for something that cost over a trillion dollars around the time I was born! Now that's a bargain!

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