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Cell phone supercomputers

In “Physics of the Future” Michio Kaku states “Today your cell phone has more computer power than all of the NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon.” and in the fictional movie “Iron Sky” the space ship “Götterdämmerung” is operated by a smart phone. So what is actually the computational power of modern cell phones? To get an answer to this question I run the linpack benchmark on my Jolla (with Qualcomm Snapdragon dual core cpu at 1.4 GHz). Indeed, according to this benchmark my cell phone has a single-core performance of the order of a Cray supercomputer of the early 1990s, more than 300Mflops, which is about an order of magnitude slower than a modern desktop cpu.

The linpack benchmak solves a large dense system of linear equations in order to determine the number of executed floating point operations per second.
The linpack benchmak solves a large dense system of linear equations in order to determine the number of executed floating point operations per second. Screenshot shows results for a Jolla smart phone.

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