DBrand added little extra details that didn’t exist on the real boards, officially as Easter eggs but probably also to serve as traps for plagiarists.
Because Casetify copied those extra details it proves they copied DBrand’s actual design rather than just copying the concept and using their own photos of motherboards, which would be allowed.
Caught red handed by DBrand’s trap streets
Supercomputing has a lot of military applications behind the scenes as well - simulation (especially for stuff like nukes that can’t easily be tested due to test ban treaties), sigint, encryption cracking, and obviously AI has a lot of potential uses as well.
I remember the PS2 being export restricted because it was “too powerful” as well…
What is to stop people what, pulling the chips of GPUs and selling them to China? Probably not lucrative enough to risk the legal consequences.
I think it’s more that in the PC world, early x86 really wasn’t very good and the 386 brought not just 32-bits, but also a lot of other improvements that made more advanced OSs like Windows 95, NT and Linux possible. So you had this major step up in capability, not specifically because of the move from 16 to 32 bits but happening at the same time.
IIRC for platforms that used the Motorola 68k the move from the 16bit 68000 to the 32bit 68020 wasn’t nearly as big because the chips were more similar (the 68000 kind of being a 16/32 bit hybrid anyway, the Atari ST even being named after Sixteen/Thirtytwo)
And the move from 32bit to 64bit CPUs in modern times is the same, there weren’t any major steps up in terms of capability other than much larger RAM address space.
And obviously for consoles “bits” was still a big marketing gimmick at the time so calling the newer console generation “32bits” was a big thing even though it doesn’t really mean anything (eg. bits dropped from the 64bit N64 to the 32bit GameCube, because no-one cared about bits anymore).