Computing · 1964

CDC 6600

Seymour Cray's machine, the first successful supercomputer.

The CDC 6600 used silicon transistors and parallel functional units to reach about 3 megaFLOPS, roughly three times IBM's fastest machine. It held the speed record until 1969.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Magnetic-core memory 1953
Transistor 1947

What it led to 1

Cray-1 1976

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Fastest computer in the world Latest: 2.2×10¹⁸ operations per second (2026) Source: Wikipedia: List of fastest computers; Wikipedia: History of supercomputing

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6

Fastest supercomputer Latest: 1.81B GFLOP/s (2025) Source: Our World in Data