THE "teraflop" computer, we are told, is a landmark in computer performance. One teraflop, for those who do who do not know, is equal to one trillion floating point operations per second, or a million million calculations each involving numbers with more that a dozen digits. Or again, a teraflop is 40 billion calculations in the time it takes to blink. That last one is according to the Financial Times, although it sounds rather imprecise.

The teraflop is now the world's fastest computer, exceeding the previous record holder, built by Hitachi, by a factor of three. The breakthrough announced by Intel during the week, was described by the company's chief operating officer, Craig Barrett, as "the digital equivalent of breaking the four minute mile. We have broken the psychological barrier.