Apollo 11 anniversary: Could an iPhone fly me to the moon?
On board Apollo 11 was a computer called the Apollo Guidance Computer. It had 2048 words of memory which could be used to store ?temporary results? ? data that is lost when there is no power. This type of memory is referred to as RAM (random-access memory). Each word comprised 16 binary digits (bits), with a bit being a zero or a one. This means that the Apollo computer had 32,768 bits of RAM memory.
In addition, it had 72KB of read-only memory (ROM), which is equivalent to 589,824 bits. This memory is programmed and cannot be changed once it is finalised.
A single alphabetical character ? say an ?A? or a ?B? ? typically requires eight bits to be stored. That means the Apollo 11 computer would not be able to store this article in its 32,768 bits of RAM. Compare that to your mobile phone or an MP3 player and you can appreciate that they are able to store much more, often containing thousands of emails, songs and photographs.
Phone memory and processing
To put that into more concrete terms, the
latest phones typically have 4GB of RAM. That is 34,359,738,368 bits. This is more than one million (1,048,576 to be exact) times more memory than the Apollo computer had in RAM. The iPhone also has up to 512GB of ROM memory. That is 4,398,046,511,104 bits, which is
seven million times more than that of the guidance computer.
But memory isn?t the only thing that matters. The Apollo 11 computer had a processor ? an electronic circuit that performs operations on external data sources ? which ran at 0.043 MHz. The latest iPhone?s processor is estimated to run at about 2490 MHz. Apple does not advertise the processing speed, but others have calculated it. This means that
the iPhone in your pocket has more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...mobile-phones-smartphone-iphone-a8988351.html
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