[wwalker3]

Stross' comparison between Cray 1 performance and that of a modern smartphone seems off. He says: "A regular ARM-powered smartphone, such as an iPhone 4S, is some 12-13 orders of magnitude more powerful as a computing device than a late 1970s-vintage Cray 1 supercomputer."

A Cray 1 could peak at about 250 MFLOPs/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1), and a modern smart phone like the Galaxy Nexus peaks at about 9.6 GFLOPs/s (using ARM Neon instructions on both cores). That's less than two orders of magnitude difference.

Floating-point power efficiency seems to have improved by about 6-7 orders of magnitude in that time though, which is very nice :)

[lmm]

Maybe he's comparing integer operations? ARM has relatively underpowered floating-point because most of the uses for an ARM (at least historically) don't involve it.

[maxerickson]

He notes it is a mistake in the comments.

But the details of the comparison don't change the part where a modern cell phone is nicely comparable to a $millions computer from a few decades ago.