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80486 Microprocessor
Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860 RISC/coprocessor chip, each of which contained more than 1 million transistors. What set the 486 apart was its optimized instruction set, with an on-chip unified instruction and data cache and an optional on-chip floating-point unit. -
iMac
Inventor Apple
The iMac sells for about $1,300. Customers got a machine with a 233-MHz G3 processor, 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, a CD-ROM drive, and a 15" monitor. The machine was recognized for its ease -of- use and included a simple manual. -
Earth Simulator
Developed by the Japanese government to create global climate models, the Earth Simulator is a massively parallel, vector-based system that costs nearly $600 million at the time. The Earth Simulator was listed as the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. -
Apple iPhone
Apple lauches the iPhone. A combination of web browser, music player and cellphone. Could download a new functionality int the form of "apps" form the Apple Store. Introduced a built in GPS, high definition camera, texting, calendar, voice diction, and weather reports. -
Roadrunner Supercomputer
Inventor IBM
The Roadrunner is the first computer to reach a sustained performance of 1 petaflop (one thousand trillion floating point operations per second). It used two different microprocessors: an IBM POWER XCell L8i and AMD Opteron. It was used to model the decay of US nuclear arsenals, analyze financial data, render 3D medical images in realtime. an offshoot of the POWER Xcell8i was used as the main processor in the Playstation 3 game console.