The iPad 2 has some impressive mobile silicon inside it. The A5 processor is a dual-core affair with a 1GHZ clock speed, capable of about 171 megaflops (or about 171 100 floating-point operations per second).
Not bad, right? But how does the iPad 2 stack up against the most powerful computer in the world, Fujitsu’s K Super Computer?
Not too well, according to the guys at Royal Pingdom. In fact, you would need about 61.5 million iPad 2s to match the 10 Billion megaflops of the K Computer.
That’s enough iPad 2s that if you stacked them on top of one another, the pile would be 540 kilometers high. That’s the equivalent of about 1,700 Eiffel Towers stacked end-to-end.
Well, sure. Fine. But can the K computer run Infinity Blade 2? Thought not.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
34 responses to “It Would Take 61 Million iPads 2s To Match The Power Of The World’s Best Supercomputer”
4:20
Nice.
But how many Eniacs would it take to equal one iPad?
171 MFLOPS is 171,000,000 not 171,000 #corrections
Ah, but how many *insert android tablet name here* does it take to equal one iPad 2?
But how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
This is really dumb. Â Why would anyone want to compare the processing power of an iPad to the world’s fastest super computer?
iPad 2s*Â
how is this news? i dont understand some of the postings on this sight. I mean CoM can turn out some very useful and intersting articles. But what purpose does this article have? Slow news day I guess
It’s exactly equal to the number of ways that Apple is better than MIcrosoft
By the way who took the photo at 4:20 wink,wink.
Neither of these devices use Intel processors, so why would you use that image? Who would make that image? I hate you John Brownlee.
lol we should form a club. Side note: i have a feeling the computer working at the capacity of 6 million ipads could run Infinity Blade if someone programed it to undermine apple. stupid ending to another pointless Brownlee story.
my advice? If you See Brownlee’s name under the title, lower your expectations.
But not useful to me atleast as one of those ipads..
Holy crap. What a stupid piece.