A high grade consumer gpu a (a 4090) is about 80 teraflops. So rounding up to 100, an exaflop is about 10,000 consumer grade cards worth of compute, and a petaflop is about 10.
Which doesn’t help with understanding how much more impressive these are than the last clusters, but does to me at least put the amount of compute these clusters have into focus.
My point of reference is that back in undergrad (~10-15 years ago), I recall a class assignment where we had to optimize matrix multiplication on a CPU; typical good parallel implementations achieved about 100-130 gigaflops (on a... Nehalem or Westmere Xeon, I think?).
Which doesn’t help with understanding how much more impressive these are than the last clusters, but does to me at least put the amount of compute these clusters have into focus.