$1,000 PC at a trillion calculations per second

Grader A: hit

A consumer graphics card delivered about a trillion operations per second by 2008-2009: the Radeon HD 4870 (June 2008, $299) was rated 1.2 TFLOPS single precision and the Radeon HD 5870 (September 2009, $379) 2.72 TFLOPS. A PC with such a card fit in a $1,000 budget. CPU-only performance was far lower (tens of GFLOPS).

Test: Numeric test: about 1 trillion calculations per second for $1,000. Actual 2009: 1.2-2.7 TFLOPS peak single precision in a card costing $299-379, so a $1,000 PC reached at least 1 TFLOPS (at or above the claim).

• Radeon HD 4000 series (Wikipedia) (2008-06-25): Radeon HD 4870 launched June 2008 at $299 with 1,200 GFLOPS single precision.
• Radeon HD 5000 series (Wikipedia) (2009-09-23): Radeon HD 5870 launched September 2009 at $379 with 2,720 GFLOPS single precision.

Grader B: hit

In mid-2008 consumer GPUs (Radeon HD 4800) reached about 1 TFLOPS single precision, and a $1,000 PC with such a card had about a trillion operations per second of peak capacity in 2009. The CPU alone was about 50-100 GFLOPS.

Test: Numeric: predicted ~1e12 ops/s; actual 2009 $1,000 PC with GPU ~1.0-1.2e12 FLOPS (within 10%).

• Wikipedia: FLOPS (accessed 2026-09-28): ATI Radeon HD 4800 (mid-2008) first GPU to reach 1 TFLOPS; HD 4870X2 2.4 TFLOPS; cost $48/GFLOPS 2007, $1.80 2011; K computer 10.5 PF Nov 2011, Sequoia 16 PF Jun 2012, Titan 17.6 PF Nov 2012.