The first thing you should understand about bench marking with TFLOPS is that this isn't a good measurement of performace. Modern processors have a seperate unit for floating point operations which means two processors can have the same clock speed and process flops at different speeds. It depends on what the processor designers thought was more important. I don't know a whole lot about the G4s, but intel focuses mostly on instruction sets that improve speed with multimedia programs. Because most multimedia programs don't use a lot of floating point operations, they don't focus on improving the speed of the flops. The biggest execption to this is 3D games, but most of the flops are done on the graphics card now with specialized hardware.
The reason supercomputers are measured in TFLOPS is because most of the applications running on supercomputers are scientific simuations. These generally have a lot of complex math done with flops.
But this still doesn't account for a lot of the bottlenecks that might occur in the calcuations. The major bottlenecks would be the bus speed which in 1GHZ on the G5 and 400MHZ on P4s and the speed of the network. The P4s just came out with a 800MHZ bus and a 1GHZ bus, but older supercomputers might not have these. The network on VT's terascale supercomputer is using an infinaband network, which is the fastest avalible today without using a custom built network.
I worked on the terascale server and Jason Lockheart said the speed was calculated, but they weren't releasing any information on the benchmarking done on it until later so it wouldn't affect their placing in the top 500 list. So I don't know where slashdot got their information, but I wouldn't trust it completly.
On a side note, those G5s are looking really nice right now. Dual 2.4GHZ and 1GHZ bus speed, not to mention OSX. Almost makes me want to go out and buy one. Almost, they're still macs, but mabe in a couple years. It's apple's first attempt at selling computers based on their power and not on how good they look.
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The first thing you should understand about bench marking with TFLOPS is that this isn't a good measurement of performace. Modern processors have a seperate unit for floating point operations which means two processors can have the same clock speed and process flops at different speeds. It depends on what the processor designers thought was more important. I don't know a whole lot about the G4s, but intel focuses mostly on instruction sets that improve speed with multimedia programs. Because most multimedia programs don't use a lot of floating point operations, they don't focus on improving the speed of the flops. The biggest execption to this is 3D games, but most of the flops are done on the graphics card now with specialized hardware. The reason supercomputers are measured in TFLOPS is because most of the applications running on supercomputers are scientific simuations. These generally have a lot of complex math done with flops. But this still doesn't account for a lot of the bottlenecks that might occur in the calcuations. The major bottlenecks would be the bus speed which in 1GHZ on the G5 and 400MHZ on P4s and the speed of the network. The P4s just came out with a 800MHZ bus and a 1GHZ bus, but older supercomputers might not have these. The network on VT's terascale supercomputer is using an infinaband network, which is the fastest avalible today without using a custom built network. I worked on the terascale server and Jason Lockheart said the speed was calculated, but they weren't releasing any information on the benchmarking done on it until later so it wouldn't affect their placing in the top 500 list. So I don't know where slashdot got their information, but I wouldn't trust it completly. On a side note, those G5s are looking really nice right now. Dual 2.4GHZ and 1GHZ bus speed, not to mention OSX. Almost makes me want to go out and buy one. Almost, they're still macs, but mabe in a couple years. It's apple's first attempt at selling computers based on their power and not on how good they look.