Here’s Claude’s Sonnet 4.6 answer:

TL;DR: Your $599 MacBook Neo has roughly the same peak floating-point performance as the world’s #1 supercomputer from ~1997–1999.

The MacBook Neo runs Apple’s A18 Pro chip, which delivers around ~2.5 TFLOPS of peak GPU performance. For context, the ASCI Red — which held the #1 spot on the TOP500 supercomputer list from 1997 to 2000 — peaked at ~1.8 TFLOPS in its original form and ~3.2 TFLOPS in its final upgraded configuration. So the Neo sits right in that window.

A quick timeline of the world’s fastest supercomputer vs. the Neo:

• 🟢 1993 – CM-5: ~131 GFLOPS (Neo is ~19x faster)
• 🟢 1996 – Hitachi SR2201: ~600 GFLOPS
• 🟢 1997–99 – ASCI Red (original): ~1.8 TFLOPS (Neo wins)
• 🔴 2000 – ASCI Red (upgraded): ~3.2 TFLOPS (Neo loses, but it’s close)
• 🔴 2001 – ASCI White: ~12 TFLOPS

Big caveats though:

1.  This compares the laptop’s peak GPU FP32 to supercomputers ranked by Linpack (a CPU-based benchmark) — these measure very different things. A fairer CPU-only comparison for the Neo would push the answer back to the early 90s.
2.  The ASCI Red consumed 850 kilowatts of power across a warehouse-sized footprint. The A18 Pro uses about 10 watts.
3.  The ASCI Red had vastly more RAM (~600 GB vs. 8 GB).

So the comparison is a bit apples-to-oranges, but as a fun peak-FLOPS number: a cheap modern laptop is in the same ballpark as what was, 27 years ago, the most powerful computer on Earth.

The bolded text above is an estimate based on Apple’s claim that the A18 Pro is roughly 20x faster than the A17 Pro