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Deepest Mandelbrot Set Zoom Animation ever - a New Record! 10^275 (2.1E275 or 2^915)

Orson Wang
Demos
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this demo1 month2016–2025 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN uses it as a reference point for how deep Mandelbrot zooms can go and how much compute they once took.

A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.

1 recommendations · 3 citations · Demos · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@Retric May 2018 Recommends
on HN thread High-Resolution Mandelbrot in Obfuscated Python (2011)
Probably, I wonder what code they use for this: [link] because deeper zoom requires much higher precision math which takes a lot more computation. PS: Not as far but much better video: [this video]
Alternative deep zoom video the commenter calls better

Citations, criticism and jokes

@laser Jul 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Show HN: FractalViewer: A JavaScript fractal explorer
No, I mean that at a certain level of zoom the fractal appears to stop being generated, and I end up just zooming into pixel blocks. For example, if you try to recreate [this video] you can only for for a bit before the fractal appears to stop generating.
Example of deep zoom the commenter tried to reproduce
@morphle Jan 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Mandelbrot deep zoom theory and practice (2021)
Read more
In 1986 we wrote a parallel Mandelbrot program in assembly instructions in the 2K or 4K on-chip SRAM of 17 x T414 Transputer chips linked together with 4 x 10 Mbps links each into a cheap supercomputer [1]. It drew the 512 x 342 pictures on a Mac 128K as terminal at around 10 seconds per picture. I later wrote the quadruple-precision floating-point calculations in microcode [2] to speed it up by a factor of 10 and combined 52 x T414 with 20 x T800 Transputers with floating point hardware into a larger supercomputer costing around $50K. With this cheap 72 core supercomputer it still would have taken years to produce the deep zoom of the Mandelbrot set [4] that took them 6 months with 12 CPU cores running 24/7 in 2010 [3]. In 2024 we can buy a $499 M4 Mac mini (20-36 'cores') and calculate it a a few days. If I link a few M4s together with 3x32 Gbps Thunderbolt links into a cheap supercomputer and write the assembly code for all the 36 cores (CPU+GPU+Neural Engine) I can render the deep zoom Mandelbrot almost in realtime (30 frames per second). That is Moore's law in practice. The T414 had 900,000 transistors, the M4 has 28 billion transistors at 3nm (31.111 times larger at 50% of the price). The M2 Ultra with 134 billion transistors and M4 Max (estimate 100 billion transistors) are larger chips than a M4 but they are relatively more expensive then the M4 so it is cheaper and faster to link together 13 x M4 than buy 1 x M2 Ultra or 6 x M4 instead of 1 x M4 Max. Cerebras or NVid
Cited as the deep zoom that took months to render

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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