Gimme dem modern wide supercalar OOO cached chickens, please. Cray was right back then but he is no longer right now. If he were, the market would say so.
Today we know how to put 16 4 GHz CPUs on a single die. If we want, we can hook chips together to build a computer with 16,384 CPUs.
But we can't build a single chip running usefully at 16x4 GHz. We can't build a single system running at 16384x4 GHz.
If we could build that fast chip or system, all else being equal, the market would choose the single fast CPU over the pile of slow CPUs.
Right now "the market can't say so". It's impossible to provide such a system to the market. We're forced to buy computers with so many CPUs because we've pretty much hit the wall in terms of frequency scaling.
Intel Pentium 4, circa 2001, ran at about 1.4 GHz.
Intel Core i9, circa 2021, runs at about 3.5 GHz, with turbo boost to about 5.2 GHz.
That's about a 3x improvement in clock speed in 20 years. We simply can't make CPUs that run faster than that.
(I had to use x to represent multiplication, HN formatting gets funny with asterisks).
Thanks for the post but you can't in all fairness keep your "Cray is still right" opening statement when you go on to agree that in reality, which is what is important, we have to settle for lots of chickens.
