The following is a list of examples of computers that demonstrates how drastically performance has increased and price has decreased. The “cost per GFLOPS” is the cost for a set of hardware that would theoretically operate at one billion floating-point operations per second. During the era when no single computing platform was able to achieve one GFLOPS, this table lists the total cost for multiple instances of a fast computing platform which speed sums to one GFLOPS. Otherwise, the least expensive computing platform able to achieve one GFLOPS is listed.
| Date | Approximate cost per GFLOPS | Approximate cost per GFLOPS inflation adjusted to 2013 US dollars | Platform providing the lowest cost per GFLOPS | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1961 | US $1,100,000,000,000 ($1.1 trillion) | US $8.3 trillion | About 17 million IBM 1620 units costing $64,000 each | The 1620’s multiplication operation takes 17.7 ms. | |
| 1984 | $15,000,000 | $33,000,000 | Cray X-MP | ||
| 1997 | $30,000 | $42,000 | Two 16-processorBeowulf clusters withPentium Promicroprocessors | ||
| April 2000 | $1,000 | $1,300 | Bunyip Beowulf cluster | Bunyip was the first sub-US-$1/MFLOPS computing technology. It won the Gordon Bell Prize in 2000. | |
| May 2000 | $640 | $836 | KLAT2 | KLAT2 was the first computing technology which scaled to large applications while staying under US-$1/MFLOPS. | |
| August 2003 | $82 | $100 | KASY0 | KASY0 was the first sub-US-$100/GFLOPS computing technology | |
| August 2007 | $48 | $52 | Microwulf | As of August 2007, this 26.25 GFLOPS “personal” Beowulf cluster can be built for $1256. | |
| March 2011 | $1.80 | $1.80 | HPU4Science | This $30,000 cluster was built using only commercially available “gamer” grade hardware. | |
| August 2012 | $0.75 | $0.73 | Quad AMD7970 GHz System | A quad AMD 7970 desktop computer reaching 16 TFlops of single-precision, 4 TFlops of single-precision computing performance. Total system cost was $3000; it was also built using only commercially available “gamer” grade hardware. | |
| June 2013 | $0.22 | $0.22 | Sony Playstation 4 | The Sony is listed as having a peak performance of 1.84 TFLOPS, at a price of $400 | |
| November 2013 | $0.16 | $0.16 | AMD Sempron 145 GeForce GTX 760 System | Built using commercially available parts, a system using one AMD Sempron 145 and three GeForce GTX 760 reaches a total of 6.771 TFLOPS for a total cost of $1090.66. | |
| December 2013 | $0.12 | $0.12 | Pentium G550 R9 290 System | Built using commercially available parts. Pentium G550 & AMD R9 290 tops out at 4.848 TFLOPS grand total of $681.84 USD. |
The trend toward placing ever more transistors inexpensively on an integrated circuit follows Moore’s law. This trend explains the rising speed and falling cost of computer processing