Item — HN Reader

The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago

Sigh..people who use this example don't understand engineering. The Voyager doesn't need much power to do its job. An iPhone needs a lot of power to surf the web and play videos. An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time. It also has more computing power than a traffic light.

As for R&D, another possibility is that universities and small companies may be compensating for R&D stagnation in bigger companies. Many bigger companies acquire small innovative firms instead of doing the research all themselves.

4 comments

If the Voyager comparison doesn't work for you, then try the Cray-1 (or even the Cray X-MP, if your phone is a recent high-end model). "Doing its job", for most modern devices, is squandering (comparatively) enormous amounts of computational power and communications bandwidth to pretty up some pretty mundane tasks, most of which amount to reading tiny amounts of text, while showing you ads.

"An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time."

Apple is fixing this problem right now.

http://www.apple.com/watch/

Your last point is addressed at the end of the article:

> Rather than invest in their own science, big companies may now more easily buy innovative start-ups and develop their most promising discoveries into profitable technology.

> And yet this ecosystem is vulnerable, reliant on a dwindling pot of public money that underwrites most university-based research.

> “The buy-up strategy would be fine if we had confidence that the university system and start-ups were picking up the slack,” Professor Arora told me. “But we still don’t understand how this division of innovative labor would work.”

> It might work. But it looks risky to put all our trust in that approach. It’s time for a different paradigm — more on that in a future column — to finance the innovation that will power America’s future.

Voyager needed computational chops to do things like error correction and starfinding and etc, I suspect that NASA stuffed as much cpu in there as they could get away with, considering the whole 'radiation' thing.

Or they went with as little as they needed. When it comes to radiation, the older/bigger circuit paths on silicon are more robust. I'd bet they used the least-powerful cpu they felt would do the job.