AFAIK, the shift is away from single fast cores to paralell processing.
But great - isn’t this like how we riled up the USSR into building bigger & bigger nukes that were useless?
“one bomb for Russia”, a certain represenattive said
Yes ... for at least the last 20 years.
Go to the "Top 500" link; they list the number of processors in each machine.
Not my area of expertise but seems to me that if you put enough of things together, write your bench mark cleverly, and you can get an arbitrarily high speed.
The feat isn't this benchmark. The feat is they've shown that they know what they are doing.
There was a post of FR not long ago about the University of West Virginia tying together a bunch of Mac G5s, 1,100 I think, and that system was almost as fast as the Cray Super Computer at about 1/100th of the cost. Something like $350,000,000 vs $3,500,000.