Android Phone Can Be Used as a Supercomputer

It sounds to me like they had the supercomputer do all the hard calculations so that the phone could just take shortcuts by looking up the answer. Kind of like if I said "what's the (square root of 191) + 1?" Then all you would have to do is look up the square root of 191 in a table, and then add 1 to it. Wow! You're a human calculator!

Don't most users just want to make a phone call and maybe surf websites?

Surely 'supercomputer' isn't an easily definable term?

the average gamin computer has exponentially more power than the original 'Supercomputers' that were used to send man to space.

by any solid definition, just about every advanced computer made today short of a netbook could be classed as a supercomputer.

Baloney! Making a device (smartphone, laptop, desktop) run a reduced, scale-down model of an app that used to run on a supercomputer does not make the device a supercomputer. Taking journalism to the extreme.

Stupid article name.
Expected supercomputers, not dumbed down simulations that run on smartphones.

Write more accurate names in the future, tom's hardware!

So can my calculator that I bought at the dollar store.

2+2=01010010101001001010

ok hands me cash and toms right an article about this "super computer"

Send the crapiest android device 30 years back in the past and you've got yourself a mighty supercomputer.

It is called coarse graining. For example you do not need to know the positions of each atom when we study a fluid, we can consider a model in which we solve up to a piece of thousands or tens of thousands of atoms. This order of magnitude faster, but you first need to check the if the coarse grained model is valid and compare with less approximate models.

Smartphones are all crap, i'm done with them. I used to had from iPhone to Nokia ecc. and they are all the same - big, heavy, fragile with buggy software, not to mention the ridiculous price nowadays.
You just can't put a smartphone on the market which has the same price as a laptop or pc.
A cellphone is made for calling and texting, that's it, everything else (apps ecc.) after a week of use or so, is becoming annoying and useless, unless you're a 14 years old kid who thinks he's cool having a smartphone.

WRONG!! In Binary, 2+2=100. You see, the (1) in said number = 4, while the second 0 would equal 2, and the last 0 would equal 0 or 1.

Using that logic, your answer was wrong, so i deserve the cash more than you! Oh and i pretty much based that off networking.

am i the only one who thinks that for the past few days toms is becoming my worse kind of journalists....
"Sensational Journalism"
Please stop giving such heading to future articles. Your readers are not dumb. pls keep simple plain less eyecatchy to the point heading. like a memo subject heading.
This is not the sun or playboy that you are reading....
my 2 cents only.
*opinions expressed are mine only. not meant to degrade or harm others.*

you just discriminated me by age :$. i only want touchscreen smartphones coz of their browsing easiness and multimedia capabilities. why i want those is they are very handy when you are not going to be home for sometime, perhaps a road trip or waiting somewhere someplace.. whats more nice than just playing a movie and watching it until the end and then you suddenly realize you have passed that much time, which would otherwise be spent struggling with boredom.

Agreed, there maybe those who think its real cool, but they just dont know the technical stuff within, and how badly their *supercomputer* smartphone would SUCK in a real race with a real gaming computer

[quotemsg=171206,14,664885]you just discriminated me by age :$. i only want touchscreen smartphones coz of their browsing easiness and multimedia capabilities. why i want those is they are very handy when you are not going to be home for sometime, perhaps a road trip or waiting somewhere someplace.. whats more nice than just playing a movie and watching it until the end and then you suddenly realize you have passed that much time, which would otherwise be spent struggling with boredom.


I have a friend who got an iPhone cause he might have to use it when he waits at the doctor once or twice a year, said he didn't want a netbook because what if he had to stand while he was waiting.

Seems to me for the $ vs time you put in you could spend it wiser. Seems to me, a little planning +cheap cell phone + portable gaming unit +netbook is easier on the eyes and wallet than iPhone + monthly rent for it + off chance it'll be useful in any meaningful way that couldn't have been accomplished easier or better. I put it in the same category as a shoe-phone. All-in-One? Ya. Stupid idea to do two things poorly, ya.

I know people love their smart phones, and I agree, they are neat, and probably the way phones are going to keep going, faster and better, but don't rationalize how awesome your phone is by telling me it's now a supercomputer, after telling me it's going to replace my desktop next week.

One day, maybe it will, blue tooth keyboard and mouse and a fast enough GPU when hooked up to my incredibly larger than 3in monitor, I can understand if I can use it without paying rent on it every month maybe. Then again, I enjoy building hot rods and don't own a prius.

Someone should seriously write Folding@Home for Android OS.

2+2=4 Sigh

Tell me you could build a cluster with 1000 smartphone systems, that is viable both economically and technically.

I will love when we'll have powerful desktop class CPUs/GPUs on systems the size of smartphones that could work on small clusters. Maybe in 20-30 years. They will need to be 50-100 times smaller and will consume what a smartphone system consumes today, or even less. For 95% of people a 2-4 Ghz quad-core arm cpu could be all they need "forever", so it makes sense the average computer system of tomorrow to be pocket size.

A smartphone today is what a desktop was 12 years ago. In 12-20 years more could we have todays systems on this size and power?

The other approach could be to have just a terminal and buy the power you need from your network cloud service provider.

I thought, by the title, the article was about running the smart phones as a parallel computing network ...

I hope you say this in regards to porting android to a machine more powerful than a smart phone. You might as well fold on a low power PIII otherwise. Not to mention the battery life reduction. Then there is also the fact that any other app you want to use on the phone will be reduced to a crawl.

folding uses a cpu (or gpu's if you have them) to its maximum capability. Smart phones (I would estimate) are under about a 5% load on average.

This comment is very ignorant. You are putting your opinion out there as fact, which is stupid. I personally use a lot of apps on a daily basis on my Blackberry which are quite useful to my daily life. GPS apps help me get to client locations quickly, weather apps let me know the conditions I'll be driving in, and receiving my email on my phone lets me stay in touch with various clients when I'm not in the office, and update my calendar to easily view my next appointments. I also read off the kindle app nearly every day during down time. I do agree that a lot of the various sound boxes and lightsaber apps do get old quickly, but there a ton of useful business orientated apps out there being used daily by a lot of people.

This looks like the old programing trick of pecomputing and save the results on tables.

and what kind of program are they talking about? Don't think any phone can come even close to a complex supercomputer proggy.

but not all computation! like in cloud computing right?

I do see ARM chips making their way into super computers, laptops and desktop. However, I don't see the point of that project. But science, like art gets a little fuzzy at the cutting edge.

Couple a smart phone up with my FIOS 25/25mbps connection so that it can access the computing power I have at home and it might be considered a light weight super computer, but on its own it's nothing more than a toy for watching youtube, texting, and calculating corrections while sniping.

just because they use it for calculations doesnt make a supercomputer.

The Droid is the only serious competition to the iPhone and what looks like an industrial strength Development Environment (web and SQL Server IDE)is being ported or already running on both phones.

http://relationalframework.com/mobiledevelopment.htm

Apple's made a big deal about not allowing serious software like a Development Environment on their iPhone but Motorola seems to have the opposite approach. The speculation that docking stations may soon replace the desktop seems to be gaining real momentum.

I'm sure Steve Jobs will claim he invented Android.

Next Toms Hardware Article.. "iPhone 4 can be used as a can opener"
After using a traditional can opener to open the can.. you then use the iphone to push the lid up and take it off.. and viola! your iphone is a can opener.

This is one of the worst articles I have seen in a long time. Talk about creative liberty.

LOL, how pedestrian. I bet your toaster just makes bread get hot and crunchy, too... Poor, poor man! Get with the times!