A pattern that recurs through the book is that Cray's achievements worked out best when he collaborated with the much lesser-known Les Davis, who was a master of organization and execution. A good local newspaper article from Davis as of a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334470. I hope someone has gotten a full oral history from Mr. Davis.
So todays processor have higher peak bandwidth, on average, Cray can sustain larger bandwidth.
ps: https://archive.is/FWzLF read jojomonkeyboy comment
Intel's i7s and Xeons have a more general purpose architecture with much less parallelism, but still manage a steady few hundred Gflops on Linpack.
If memory access is fast compared to the CPU, RISC designs are more optimal (as you can increase the CPU frequency). If memory accesses take longer than CPU execution, then CISC designs start to make more sense (do more complex things in one go once the CPU is done waiting on things to finally arrive).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2 [2] http://www.greenecomputing.com/apps/linpack/linpack-top-10/
By the mid 80s, personal computers were starting to get close to these limits and the US government had to start tweaking the rule's thresholds.
