iPad 2: Supercomputer?

According to Dr. Jack Dongarra, a member of the computer science faculty at the University of Tennessee and researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Apple's iPad 2 would give a Cray 2 supercomputer a run for its money. The Cray 2 system was the world's fastest computer in 1985. Dr. Dongarra should know -- he keeps track of the 500 fastest computers in the world using a linear algebra test known as the Linpack computing benchmark that measures a computer's math capacity. His tests also show that the iPad 2 is about 10x faster than the original iPad. While all testing isn't complete, Dr. Dongarra estimates the iPad 2 will have a benchmark rating between 1.5 and 1.65 gigaflops. One gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations per second. At those rates, the iPad 2 would have remained classified as a supercomputer until 1994.