When does a really fast computer become super?
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It’s not about speed. It’s about amount of computation it can do in a period of time. Those two are different things.
Speed matters for the average consumer device because you typically only have 1 chip for a CPU with a certain number of cores. A modern supercomputer is more like a collection of a lot of computers. We’re talking about hundreds if not thousands of CPUs wired together to crunch numbers. At those scales, things like power efficiency matter more than speed. There are a lot of supercomputers built on essentially slightly customized x86 or ARM CPUs.
There’s no hard limit on what defines a supercomputer. Because it’s constantly increasing as technology advances. More than anything it comes down to how it’s used. They’re more often than not purpose built to do a particular set of tasks. Like doing trillions of floating point calculations (like multiplying decimals) for things like protein folding. Projects like Folding@Home were essentially a distributed supercomputer built on the internet using donated CPU time.
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