Q:
A: That's probably the IBM Power6. Limited mostly by the power of the cooling system, size and organisation of clusters, and the number of megawatts available to power such clusters. Microprocessors are limited mostly by coding. You can build a supercomputer for around $1250 US - but you need to code your programs to use all the cores simultaneously. For this reason, it's not much use talking about running 'crysis' on the 'roadrunner' military computer, because it won't run Windows. Also, C++ applications well written could never be replaced by some Java linked internet based cloud OS, so don't listen to Google's lies! The only thing sure about microprocessors, when performance is required, Windows is nowhere to be seen! Take a look on internet, tell me which supercomputer starts with Windows - and try to find a SINGLE Google website that runs on a Windows server. Zero.