Intel Gains, AMD Drops in Top Supercomputers

The list, published twice a year by academic researchers, once again was topped by an IBM Corp. supercomputer in the Lawrence Livermore national nuclear lab. The BlueGene/L system, as it is known, was recently upgraded and showed the ability to perform at 478 teraflops -- 478 trillion calculations per second.

That's tens of thousands of times faster than your average desktop PC today.