iPhone 17 Pro vs. Databricks
TL;DR: An iPhone 17 Pro running DuckDB outperforms Databricks Serverless SQL clusters on TPC-H at most scale factors up to SF200.
George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran, benchmarked an iPhone 17 Pro (6 CPU cores, 12 GB RAM) running DuckDB against Databricks Serverless SQL clusters (XS, S, and M, with up to 80 CPUs and 448 GB of memory) on the TPC-H benchmark at scale factors 25, 50, 100, and 200. The iPhone beat every Databricks cluster at all scales except SF200, where it was still close – with the help of an ice pack to avoid thermal throttling.
See the “I benchmarked Databricks against my iPhone” blog post and the fivetran/iphone_benchmark repository for details.
