16 billion floating point operations per second. That’s how powerful the new NEC supercomputer is. The SX-8i is a cuboid that is almost 10ft on its long side, but only 2.5ft on its short sides. It’s only $109,000. Yes, I know I said ‘only’. But think about it – remember when supercomputers were millions of dollars, only a few were made at a time, you could name them all, and only governments and large companies bought them?
NEC plans to ship 300 of these systems. The SX-8 line specializes in vector operations and is especially suited for aeronautics, civil engineering and automotive design.