Spec Sheet: Fill & Download for Free

First, ask how many supercomputers do NASA researchers have access to?The current top supercomputer (according to the Top 500 list) is Summit, you can see its spec sheet here.That’s a DoE system, so undoubtedly it occasionally runs jobs for NASA.It has 2.8 petabytes of RAM, and 2.4 million cores. It also uses 10 MW of power.That’s… actually not that much, I’m somewhat surprised.

Relatively paltry spec sheet? The iPhone does what it is intended to do and it does it better than most flagship smartphones. There are very, very few smartphones that can best the iPhone. The iPhone doesn't need the memory or the quad core processors that Android phones do because of the way it handles the resources it has. Specs are basically meaningless marketing terms without the proper context and in context the specs of the iPhone are anything but paltry. The specs will likely be raised as Apple tends to do every year but it will likely be incremental and nowhere near the level of flagship Android phones. At the same time, it will likely be faster than almost any other phone in benchmarks and real-world tests. When the iPhone 6 was released, the only thing that bested it in CPU was the Nvidia Shield Tablet; the iPhone 6 and even the iPhone 5s CPU completely trounced the competition.Take a look at the this comprehensive review from AnAndTech and tell me again that the specs are "paltry": The iPhone 6 Review. Pay close attention to The iPhone 6 Review - CPU Performance. I'm going to post a couple of images and their final summary on CPU.CPU PerformanceNow that we have a good idea of what the A8 SoC looks like, we can talk about performance. While we covered this in the preliminary article, it’s worth going over again. For those that are unfamiliar with our test suite the CPU-based tests are mostly browser-based benchmarks. Once again, although I’m not quite happy with the state of benchmarking things we’re getting close to a more platform-agnostic solution.For the most part, the A8 SoC performs admirably despite the relatively low (1.38 GHz) frequency and half the cores when compared to competing SoCs. It seems that this is mostly building upon the lead that A7's Cyclone CPUs began. It remains to be seen if other SoC manufacturers will catch up in their CPU architecture at one point or another (NVIDIA's Project Denver in particular is interesting), but for now Apple seems to be quite far in the lead in CPU performance.Other OEMs hadn't even caught up to the A7 Cyclone CPU from the iPhone 5s when the iPhone 6 and the A8 was released. Who cares about a meaningless spec sheet when a lesser specced phone is completely dominating.

It’s brilliant. It shows the world that GM’s engineers can make a car with the performance envelope of $250k supercars, for just $60k.They came to a fork in the road with the Corvette brand: They could have kept the Corvette as a nostalgia brand, a car whose performance envelope was hobbled by a layout set in the mid-1950s.The other choice was to characterize the heritage of the brand as the fastest thing that American engineering could possibly produce. That was the vision for the C2 Corvette, the version that made the Corvette’s name as a performance car.They chose excellence over nostalgia. They chose the future, not the past.The result is a stunning spec sheet, at a price that a lot of younger buyers will be able to afford. That will ensure that Corvettes have a buyer demographic for decades to come.That’s inspiring, no? Don’t we wish more organizations would show that kind of courage and leadership? Contrast this with Harley-Davidson’s heritage-driven strategy, which is proving to be catastrophic for that brand.