Christiaan,
And does anybody here have a figure in terms of FLOPS for the performance of the typical current PC?
Very rough numbers here: fastest P4, about 3-12 GFLOPs. Core Duo 20-40 GFLOPs Fast gaming graphics card, around 80-800 GFLOPs. XBox360 around 1TFLOP. Sony PS3 around 2TFLOPs.
The numbers are very rough since they specifically refer to floating ops and there are a bazillion ways of measuring even that specific metric, the FLOP is a very poor way of measuring overall performance, and in all the above devices other than maybe the graphics cards you don't necessarily see all the FLOPs at once, and they're not all there to do what you want them to do. For example, individual components of the XBox 360 and PS3 max out around 200-400 GFLOPs.