[verbify]

There were 27 years between the release of the iphone 5 and the Cray, and at a $649 release price, it was approximately 50,000 times cheaper.

So, if this was linear, we can all expect 130 petaflop computers around 2043 for around $3,500?

Lots of caveats here though, things aren't usually as linear as all this, and this is very much a back-of-a-napkin calculation.

[TheOtherHobbes]

For many services the phone is just a relatively dumb front end, and the actual computing happens on cloudy clusters elsewhere.

Given that Moore's Law is creaking I wouldn't expect pocket petaflops any time soon. I'd expect a serious outbreak of cloudy clusters everywhere, and perhaps a dynamically reconfigurable Internet 2.0 with completely transparent non-localised computation.

This might change if computing finally goes optical and/or quantum. But if we're pushing electrons around wires, current hardware is close to the physical limits. The only way to speed it up is to build a lot more of it and speed up the connections.

[aquadrop]

I think it's speeding up. 1975 Cray-1 had approximately same 160 MFlops as first iphone had. And it was 32 years between them. So, probably we'll have 130 petaflops around 2033-2035? :)

[agumonkey]

Nobody needs more than 640TFLOPS.

[mrkgnao]

-Bill Gates?