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.
