It's a bit odd, the way this is presented as a discovery by an amateur mathematician. It's a distributed calculation, and his machine was the one that found it. It's largely chance, although it does appear that he has souped up his hardware.
Just ... very odd.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904237 :
GIMPS Discovers Largest Known Prime Number: 2^136279841 – 1 (mersenne.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858024 :
New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably) (mersenne.org)
