# What year is it in Cellphoneland? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 17, 2010, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271 "2010-02-17T00:06:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![lazybratsche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ba8739/32.png) [@lazybratsche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lazybratsche)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2010, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271/41 "2010-02-18T16:41:19Z")
> [@Ximenean](#): > > Yeah, but ARM is a RISC CPU, i.e. each instruction doesn’t do very much. MIPS comparisons with a CISC CPU like a Pentium are not that meaningful. Gotcha. Ignorance fought! ---
**Author:** ![Sapo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ec9cab/32.png) [@Sapo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sapo)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2010, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271/42 "2010-02-18T21:43:49Z")
> [@lazybratsche](#): > > … > Moral of the story? For basic tasks, the iphone might be comparable to a ten year old computer, but if you want to run a physics simulation you’d be better off dusting off that 25 year old computer in the attic. A very interesting response. ---
**Author:** ![Fubaya](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c2a13f/32.png) [@Fubaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fubaya)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2010, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271/43 "2010-02-18T23:05:48Z")
As ancedotal evidence, most unix commands take a lot longer to execute on my iphone 3g than my 2GHz desktop. Desktop on left, iPhone on right. All commands ran through the same terminal on my computer using ssh for the phone commands. (simply displaying the uptime) time uptime \> /dev/null real 0m0.002s 0m0.049s user 0m0.000s 0m0.000s sys 0m0.003s 0m0.030s (displaying the date) time date \> /dev/null real 0m0.003s 0m0.049s user 0m0.002s 0m0.010s sys 0m0.000s 0m0.020s (dumping a text-only version of this forum) time links -dump [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=3](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=3) \> /dev/null real 0m1.011s 0m3.503s user 0m0.066s 0m1.580s sys 0m0.005s 0m0.180s (listing my home directory, on PC it has 15 files and directories, on phone only 6 directories) time for i in $(ls); do echo $i; done \> /dev/null real 0m0.003s 0m0.033s user 0m0.001s 0m0.000s sys 0m0.001s 0m0.040s (display date and change all uppercase letters to numbers. In retrospect, this command probably didn’t do anything) time for i in $(date); do echo $i | tr [A-Z] [0-9]; done \> /dev/null real 0m0.016s 0m0.250s user 0m0.006s 0m0.040s sys 0m0.009s 0m0.210s (Taking all my ssh keys and replacing numbers with letters. my ssh directories are identical on PC and phone) time for i in $(cat ~/.ssh/\*); do echo $i | tr [0-9] [A-J]; done \> /dev/null real 0m0.212s 0m1.940s user 0m0.062s 0m0.260s sys 0m0.127s 0m1.620s Heh, it’s fun trying to come up with a difficult one that may take a while to compute. This takes all my ssh keys, changes all the numbers to letters, changes all uppercase to lowercase, puts a space between all of them, replaces the space with a newline, sorts all lines, filters out unique lines and counts them. Huge difference in processing time here. time for i in $(cat ~/.ssh/\*); do echo $i | tr [0-9] [A-J] | tr [A-Z] [a-z] | sed ‘s/ \*/ /g’ | tr ’ ’ ’ '; done | sort | uniq | wc -l \> /dev/null real 0m0.543s 0m5.928s user 0m0.188s 0m1.270s sys 0m0.332s 0m4.530s ---
**Author:** ![AWB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/bb73d2/32.png) [@AWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AWB)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2010, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271/44 "2010-02-20T04:10:39Z")
All this basically means that your average cell phone today (2010) has much more computing power than NASA had when they sent missions to the moon (1969). ---
**Author:** ![HorseloverFat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8e8cbc/32.png) [@HorseloverFat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HorseloverFat)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2010, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271/45 "2010-02-20T04:53:44Z")
Well, in 40 years thats pretty expected. I dont know why people hold up the lunar missions as some golden age of computing. Getting to the moon isnt computationally difficult and if anything this shows how clever engineers can be when they have limited resources to accomplish a task. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2010, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271/46 "2010-02-20T13:58:31Z")
> [@AWB](#): > > All this basically means that your average cell phone today (2010) has much more computing power than NASA had when they sent missions to the moon (1969). So does the little chip in a singing greeting card. That’s not much to trumpet. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-year-is-it-in-cellphoneland/529271.md?page=2)