In the June 2008 Top 500 list, the Cray XT Jaguar was number 5 with 205 teraflop/s. By comparison, the number 1 was an IBM Roadrunner Bladecentre, with a mix of 6,562 Dual Core Opterons and 12,240 PowerXCell8i Cell Processors, housed in 278 cabinets. That got up to 1.026 petaflop/s.

In June the Jaguar had 30,000 Quad Core Opterons, and now it has 45,000. The previous machine was an XT4, but the most recent update shows that 200 XT5 cabinets have been added to it. I have been unable to find how many cabinets the Jaguar has in total, but it seems that in June it had 313 (30,000 Opterons and 96 Opterons per cabinet). To me, the Jaguar seems to be two machines: the Cray XT4, and the Cray XT5. I'm also wary how increasing the number of processors by 50% yeilds an 800% performance increase. I'm going to wait until the official figures have been released on the 18th.

If the Jaguar has had a performance increase, then I'd say the IBM machine would have had one too. It seems Cray are just fighting a war of attrition, trying to win back the supercomputing crown they held for so long (in the company's previous incarnations). They seem to be throwing processors at the problem. Yes there is more to supercomputers than processors (interconnects, switching, and memory management design are also vital ), but a 45,000 processor beast taking up 500+ cabinets is not a very elegant solution compared to a machine with 18,800 processors taking up only 278 cabinets (and arguably using far less power).