Rebuilding an iPhone's Compute With 1980 Tech Would Take 1.7 GW, Author Calculates
PTrubey · x · 2026-09-09
A thought experiment: today's iPhone GPU delivers 2.5 TFLOPS FP32, while the fastest 1980 supercomputer, the Cray-1, managed just 160 MFLOPS — a 15,000x gap. Scaling Cray-1 tech (115 kW per cabinet) to iPhone-level compute would consume 1.7 GW and occupy a footprint comparable to today's largest datacenters. And that ignores the iPhone's 16-core Neural Engine (35 TOPS) and CPU. Saying you carry a supercomputer in your pocket, the author argues, is an understatement.
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