It’s the year 2015, and were you a citizen from the 1980s transported to the here and now, you’d probably be expecting floating/flying cars, teleportation, magnetic trains, and Marty McFly’s hoverboard. Sadly, we are only at the verge of discovering these things. But that is not to say that the progress of technology has been slow. If you know how much raw processing power you have in your hands in a mid-range smartphone, you would probably be surprised at what those level meant a few decades back.
We like images and infographics – they deliver simple truths in small but impactful packages. So it’s good that Experts Exchange has given us a quite a few images to digest, showing just how much processing power and storage capacity has increased in the last few years. If you’ve been a part of these generations, you will walk away with a sense of awe.
Think about this – a single Apple iPhone 5 has 2.7 times the processing power than the 1985 Cray-2 supercomputer. The Cray-2 was the thing for processing engineering models and large quantity computations then. You have more than twice that power in your hands, and you sometimes complain that it lags. A stark comparison – the Apollo guidance computer, the one that guided men to the moon, has as much power as two 1985 Nintendo Entertainment Systems.
The increase in performance only got better with technology that the gap became larger even in short generational jumps. The processing power in a single Samsung Galaxy S6 is comparable to 5 units of Sony PlayStation 2’s. If you want to see more information (and pictures! Yay!), head on over to the very enlightening source site.
SOURCE: Experts Exchange
