Comment by firecall

Comment by firecall 13 hours ago

11 replies

I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is?

Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s!

Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!

wmoxam 12 hours ago

Recently I've found myself wanting a tricorder type device.

  • esseph 9 hours ago

    With the visual analysis of LLMs, throw in some extra ingredients with a camera, microphone, speaker, and display, and were getting close. Add Bluetooth for biosensors and... Iterate a couple of generations...

    We're getting there!

hypersoar 12 hours ago

From the Wikipedia article on the Cray 1:

"The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance

...

By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."

  • hulitu 9 hours ago

    > while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[

    Sustained ? Or just for some ms when the thermals kick in ?

FridayoLeary 13 hours ago

At the risk of sounding cliche i'll point out that ios probably uses several times the capacity of a cray 1 just to get the keyboard to work.

  • estimator7292 11 hours ago

    Yes, but the impressive part is that the iPhone does it on a few mW instead of a few MW

    • [removed] 9 hours ago
      [deleted]
qsera 12 hours ago

>how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is..

Sadly most of that power is not working for you, most of the time, but working against you, by spying, tracking and manipulating you.

Bet that was not include in your sci-fi dreams in 70s..

  • FarmerPotato 11 hours ago

    Oh but we had The Forbin Project, its sequel Colossus, and later Wargames. Not to mention Star Trek episodes with malignant computers. And I have No Mouth But I Must Scream.

    In the 70s, science fiction fed me Cold War fears of world-controlling mainframes.

  • Angostura 7 hours ago

    I'd love to see you substantiate that - bet you can't.

    • timbit42 2 minutes ago

      I certainly can't. I'm running GrapheneOS.