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> AKA eventually everything runs on a potato.

If we're talking web servers, sure. Video games? For the most part. Numerical high performance computing? ehhhhhhhhh i'm not sure history bears that out

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> Numerical high performance computing?

Any numerical high performance computing from 1995 will run on a 100$ android phone.

Really? Even with this very generous 30 year gap ... you think you can run non-toy climate models on a $100 phone? Correlated quantum chemistry for a polyatomic system? Even just fully ray-traced rendering?

This was the fastest supercomputer in 1995, approximately the capabilities of a modern phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_T3E

And if this was the fastest, the average ones were significantly smaller.

What you're missing is that the things you mentioned sometimes took months to run in the fastest computers thirty years ago, but you are mentally expecting them to work quicker now.

Yes, computers are faster now than they were 30 years ago. But no, basically no one runs HPC on $100 phones or desktop potatoes. It is still almost exclusively done on at the very least high-end workstations, and more usually on HPC clusters and/or expensive GPUs.

Anyway, interesting talk, thanks. Have a good one.

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