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Your iPhone vs The World's Fastest Computer

Computing · Animated · 28 seconds

Both growing at Moore's Law rates for 30 years. Your iPhone is faster than the world-record supercomputer of 1999.

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The story

Both lines grow at roughly Moore's Law rates — doubling every 18 months or so. The difference is that supercomputers have been doing it since 1993, and iPhones joined the race in 2007 starting far behind. But because the slopes are the same, the gap between the two lines stays roughly constant in time: about 24 years.

The punchline: your iPhone would have set the world record for compute performance in 1999. Not in the 1960s. 1999.

Sources: TOP500.org (supercomputer rankings); Apple chip technical specifications; GPU peak FP32 performance estimates.