This is no longer the case!
the 1990s have witnessed the development of Highly Parallel Supercomputers
- the Cray T3D (1994-97) has 512 processors, 32 gigabytes of memory, 40 gigaflops
- the Cray T3E (1998) has 576 processors, 148 Gbytes of RAM and is rated at over 122 gigaflops of sustained speed
by about 2000AD HPC will be offering over 1 million gigaflops of sustained computation