Even supercomputers get superseded

But a recent event in the high performance computing sector puts all this to shame. Roadrunner - the first supercomputer to break the petaflop barrier - has been retired from the US Los Alamos National Laboratory after operating for just five years. Roadrunner, which cost more than $120million to build, featured 6563 dual core AMD Opteron processors, with each core linked to a PowerXCell 8i - an enhanced version of the Cell processor found in the Sony Playstation 3. It used 55 miles of fibre optic cable to link its various parts and consumed 2.35MW. Roadrunner has been replaced with something smaller, faster, more energy efficient and cheaper - the same features for which consumers on the High Street are looking.