Parts/CPUs/Intel Pentium Pro 200 MHz
CPUs · P6 · 1996
Intel Pentium Pro 200 MHz
The commodity part that made ASCI Red the first teraflop machine: 9,000-plus of them, at a time when supercomputers still meant custom silicon.
Why this part
The chip that ended the custom-processor era. ASCI Red reached a teraflop on a part you could buy in a desktop PC, and the argument it settled was economic rather than technical: a vector processor designed for a handful of laboratories carries the whole cost of its own development, while a mass-market microprocessor arrives with that cost already amortised across millions of units. Intel's answer to "why is this fast enough" was simply to use 9,298 of them. Every commodity-cluster machine since is downstream of this decision, and the vector architectures that had held the top of the list for two decades never recovered.
Systems using this part
- Systems
- 1
- Rmax underneath
- 1.07 TFlop/s
- Units recorded
- 9,298
| System | Role | Country | Units | System Rmax | Supplied by | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASCI Red 1997-06 | CPU | USA | 9,298 | 1.07 TFlop/s | Intel | #1 → |
“Units recorded” sums only the edges where a public source states a quantity. It is a floor, not a total, and should never be read as installed base.