Yes, when people use "supercomputer on a chip" marketing like this, they mean "as powerful as a supercomputer of X years ago" for some value of X, as well frequ

Yes, when people use "supercomputer on a chip" marketing like this, they mean "as powerful as a supercomputer of X years ago" for some value of X, as well frequently "using high levels of parallelism like a supercomputer does." I just checked the Top500 list from November 1999 (just an arbitrary year to pick) and the lowest on the list hits 38.5 GFlop/s, so if the Parallella gets 90 GFlop/s, it's ell within the range of supercomputers of 14 years ago. In fact, it looks like it would still make the cut in the November 2000 list, but is hitting the edge in the June 2001 and solidly off the November 2001 list. All, of course, assuming that the 90 GFlop/s quoted is comparable to that measured on the Top500 machines; but even if you toss in a factor of 2 or 4, that still only pushes you a few more years. Of course, if you stretch that X back a few more years, almost any modern processor is a supercomputer on a chip. I remember when the Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer to dream about, and nowadays its performance would be considered mid-tier for a smartphone.