Smartphones
The largest single slice of the partition, and nobody planned it. Seven billion phones, each with a GPU and a neural engine, quietly out-compute every datacenter on Earth put together. Almost none of it is ever used for anything harder than rendering a feed.
Smartphones over time
Installed compute in zettaFLOP/s, log scale, 2008 → present. A straight line on this axis means steady exponential growth; the slope is the doubling rate. History before the 2026 anchor is reconstructed — see the methodology.
7.21B active handsets x ~3.2 TFLOP/s dense FP16 (mobile GPU + NPU at its FP16 rate).
7.21 billion ACTIVE handsets (Ericsson; Counterpoint puts 2025 growth at 2 percent, with replacement cycles near four years). Per-device is a tier model over the installed base, not over new sales — the global median handset is several years old. A current flagship is ~25 TFLOP/s counting GPU and neural engine; a five-year-old budget phone is ~0.15. Crediting the NPU is a convention, so the low end of the range for this slice counts the GPU alone.
Overlap treatment: Handset SoCs only. Tablets and laptops are the personal-computer line; the cell networks behind them are not compute.
Growth: compounding at 1.18× a year (50.3-month doubling) between published vintages.