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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

imagine showing even the first iphone to a Cray engineer in 1976

they'd lose their minds lol

(Cray-1 was 160 megaflops, smartphones are teraflops)

The Cray-1 was measured on 64-bit FLOPS, so you would have to do apples-to-apples (heh). A modern iPhone can do 300 GF of 64-bit, so only 2000x.

The iPhone 4 was probably the first that could beat a Cray-1, and it was by a narrow margin. However, that was only a 32-bit chip. The next year iPhones went 64-bit, and it was all over.

There is also the issue of cooling. The iPhone will need extra cooling in order to function at full speed for more than a few minutes.

We live in an amazing era, where the limit to what we can do is (almost?) more what we can imagine to do than what we are actually able to do.

oh, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what is a heaven for?

I phrase this to my kids in a different way, but same exact sentiment: The only limit these days is a modest amount of resources and the ideas in your head.

ie. Feature film? Sure. Music album, sure. Your own electronics project designed at the kitchen table, ordered from china, housings printed on the 3d printer -- all from the table.

It is an absolutely astoundingly low bar of entry these days to almost anything you'd like to create or build.

What is worth creating when anyone can create anything?

I genuinely love r/TheyDidTheMath corrections, thank you!

(now calculate it in iphone charger plug computing power heh > lunar lander)

I don't think they would be that surprised. Look at the inside of the Cray-1: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/inside-red-yellow-cray-super...

If you were an engineer working on this machine, it was visually clear to you that the modularity took up the majority of the space. The ICs themselves were already pretty dense.

They wouldn't loose their minds.

Pace of computer power increase was huge even back then, so imagining something like a powerful pocket computer was quite an easy thing to do.

I can easily imagine that these engineers would be disappointed by the first iPhone because, by interpolation, they expected something like that by the early 1990's.

I am running a Cray Simulator at faster than full speed on a cheap Raspberry Pi knockoff called "Le Potato" and I spent the weekend vibecoding weather forecasting software for it as a tribute to NCAR.

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