A SmartPhone Is Millions Of Times Faster Than A Spacecraft

Apollo 11 was the first spaceflight that landed humans on the Moon. Mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz.

The Tecno Phantom 6 Announced

September 2016 and the 2016 flagship smartphone from TECNO mobile sporting a massive 3GB RAM and operates at 2.0Ghz Octa-core with 32GB of memory. Today, however, even a simple USB stick or WiFi router is more powerful, let alone a Tecno Phone.

It operates at 2.0 GHz and can process instructions at a rate of approximately 1.8 instructions every cycle in each of its 8 cores. That’s 20.16 billion instructions per second. Put simply, the phantom 6 clock is 195,600 times faster than the best Apollo 11 era computers and could perform instructions 720,000,000 times faster.

You would be wrong in saying a Tecno Phantom 6 could be used to guide 720,000,000 Apollo era spacecraft to the moon, all at the same time. A smartphone is certainly powerful enough to do the calculations but Processing power isn't everything (till Tecno mobile builds a phone that can work in space), though.

The Apollo computers were far more reliable than a smartphone, particularly in the harsh environment of space (a stray cosmic ray can ruin a computer that isn't radiation protected). They had specialist software and custom interfaces with the spacecraft's systems. They were also used by experts with many years of training.

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