In 1985, the Cray-2 was the fastest computer on Earth — a liquid-cooled, room-sized beast that cost as much as a small hospital and hummed away at a blistering 1.9 GFLOPS. Fast forward to 2026, and the iPhone 16 Pro in your back pocket casually clears 2,000+ GFLOPS of FP32 compute. That's not a typo — your phone is roughly 1,000 times faster than what NASA and top research labs once fought over allocation time for. The Galaxy S25 Ultra pushes even further, hitting 2,500–3,500+ GFLOPS, making it up to 1,800 times faster than Seymour Cray's masterpiece. The supercomputer that once simulated nuclear tests and weather patterns for entire governments now loses a flat-out compute race to a device you use to scroll memes at breakfast.
But raw speed isn't even the most humbling comparison — it's the AI gap. The Cray-2 had zero dedicated neural processing hardware, because "AI accelerators" simply weren't a concept yet; every calculation ran through its general-purpose vector processors. Meanwhile, the iPhone 16 Pro packs a 38 TOPS Neural Engine, and the Galaxy S25 Ultra counters with a 40–45 TOPS NPU purpose-built for machine learning tasks. This means your phone can do real-time image recognition, live language translation, and on-device generative AI — tasks the Cray-2 couldn't have touched even if you gave it a decade of runtime. It's the difference between a car with no steering wheel and one with a full self-driving mode.
Then there's the power bill. The Cray-2 guzzled a staggering 150,000 to 200,000 watts just to stay operational, requiring a submersion cooling system using an inert liquid called Fluorinert to keep it from melting itself. Your iPhone sips 5–8 watts at peak, and the Galaxy S25 Ultra tops out around 6–10 watts. That means the Cray-2 consumed somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 times more power than the flagship phone charging on your nightstand right now — enough electricity to run tens of thousands of modern smartphones simultaneously, just to match one Cray's workload.
Size and weight tell an equally absurd story. The Cray-2 tipped the scales at roughly 2,500 kg (5,500 lbs) and needed about 16 square feet of dedicated floor space, complete with its own climate-controlled room. Your iPhone weighs about 199 grams, and the Galaxy S25 Ultra clocks in at 218 grams — meaning the Cray-2 was somewhere around 11,000 to 12,500 times heavier than the phone that now outperforms it. You could fit thousands of modern flagships into the physical footprint that one supercomputer demanded, and still have room to spare.
Finally, let's talk money and memory. The Cray-2 launched at approximately $17.5 million in 1985 dollars — north of $50 million when adjusted for today's inflation — while the iPhone 16 Pro starts around $999 and the Galaxy S25 Ultra around $1,299. That's a price gap measured in the tens of thousands of times. And on the storage front, the Cray-2 relied on clunky external disk systems, while today's phones ship with 128 GB to 1 TB of blazing-fast built-in NVMe or UFS 4.0 storage. The machine that once represented the absolute pinnacle of human computing achievement has been thoroughly and hilariously outclassed by a device that also lets you order pizza and argue with strangers online.
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This full network capture and analysis solution is a versatile, integrated, portable or rack-mount device, that gives detailed infrastructure traffic visibility. It enables you to obtain historical and real-time data without jeopardizing your network security and performance.
Available in 1G and 10G models.
