Last week, an undersea exploration crew, funded and directed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, recovered two engines believed to be from Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The F-1 Rocket Engines were pulled from the sea floor of the coast of Florida about 2.5 miles bellow the Atlantic Ocean.
Something interesting to me and hard to comprehend in today’s computer age is the power of the Apollo guidance computer that sent the astronauts to the moon 40 years ago compared to the power of modern computers.
The processing power of the Apollo 11 computer was 2.048 MHz. Today’s average computer CPU processing power is 2-3 GHz with multiple cores which can double or quadruple that power. For interested minds, one gigahertz is equal to one thousand megahertz, which is thousands of times faster merely in the number of cycles per second.
The Apollo computer had 32 Kilowords of fixed memory for storage and four Kilowords of usable processing ram. It is very hard to compare that ram to todays ram but if you did it would be millions of times more powerful. -editor’s note: four Kilowords is equal to 1.49e-5 GB.
Other advances in architecture of RAM and processors make any real comparison to modern day computers almost impossible. It would be like comparing the Wright flyer to the Saturn rocket that hurled Apollo 11 into space in the first place. Moore’s Law (created by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel) states that computer power doubles approximately every 18 months. That has held true so far; perhaps in another 40 years, we will wonder how we ever used something as clunky as a MacBook Air.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/jeff-bezos-apollo/