Phone vs. Supercomputers | Hacker News Reader

Phone vs. Supercomputers

tnhh.net

11 pointsca98am795 comments

The iPhone may be a supercomputer as of 10 years ago, but I hate how restrictive it is. I can’t build an app on the iPhone, deploy and share it with others.

Our devices have made us excessive consumers instead of producers.

I have the exact opposite impression. A few months ago I was directing a stage play, planning to shoot it with a high-end camera and stream it to YouTube via OBS. But I ran into two problems. First, I couldn't get a live feed from my camera. Second, the internet bandwidth at the theatre wasn't sufficient to support a hi-def stream.

I ended up solving both problems with my iPhone, shooting the show with FiLMiC Pro, using OBS Camera to send the live feed to a laptop running OBS and finally using my phone as a hotspot for the laptop to stream the show to YouTube. In a pinch, I could have eliminated the laptop from the setup entirely. The iPhone is a goddamn pocket miracle.

Yes, it's restricted as a development platform, but it has put incredible content creation tools into the hands of millions of people. And, yes, there are more consumers than producers (and always will be), but there are so very many producers out there now. Look at TikTok and Instagram (and before Instagram, Flickr).

Meh, you’re complaining about distributing pre-built binaries to random people around the world. Yes, Apple restricts that. They do not meaningfully restrict deploying code that you build yourself on phones you control yourself. You could certainly build a supercomputer out of iPhones, if you wanted (which would be interesting).

If the graph is correct, the current entry bar for the top 500 is exactly 100 times the iPhone. So a cluster of 100 iPhones could scrape into the list? (With the right interconnect, obviously - I doubt apple are bringing infiniband to iOS)

Huh, you're right! The current #500 system [1] consists of 1496 20-core Xeon processors, for a linpack performance of 1316TFLOPS. The GPU of an iPhone 12 is ~800GFLOPS for FP32 on the GPU, which implies that ~1600 iPhone 12's combined are more powerful than this cluster of Xeon's when you look at raw compute power.

The difference is that a Xeon is significantly more flexible than a GPU, though. I cannot find good performance numbers on the A14's CPU, though an estimated guess suggests that it would be more in the order of magnitude of ~10GFLOPS instead of ~800GFLOPS per A14. Or ~100.000 iPhones to match the #500 supercomputer.

Apple sold ~40 million iPhone 11's in 2020, with iPhone 12 sales being ~20% higher than those of the iPhone 11. That's about 10 supercomputers worth of iPhone CPU power sold per week.

[1] https://www.top500.org/system/179351/

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