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We should all take some time to consider that our light bubs have more powerful computers than the first computer many of us once owned. This perspective makes
by teekert 5y ago
We should all take some time to consider that our light bubs have more powerful computers than the first computer many of us once owned.
This perspective makes scifi stuff like "smart dust" seem a lot more feasible. Ubiquitous computing, what will it bring us?
- Angostura 5y agoI always like the fact that the average musical birthday card, popular in the 90s had more compute capacity than the computer in the Apollo command module.
- Eduard 5y agoI doubt.
- nl 5y agohttps://hackaday.com/2011/11/22/musical-greeting-card-with-minimal-parts/ https://hackaday.com/2011/11/22/musical-greeting-card-with-m... shows building a music card on an ATTiny 85. These are around 20 MIPS. The Apollo guidence computer had around 1 MIPS.
- kolinko 5y agoYou can build a music card on ATTiny, but music cards didn’t use ATTiny.
- nl 5y agoSure, but I couldn't find a teardown. It seems likely they are using something similar. It's difficult to find a cheaper chip, broadly available chip these days. You can find Z80 clones, but even they are generally upgraded and therefore more powerful than the Apollo computer.
- nl 5y agoWow the downvotes on this are pretty harsh! Do people really think the Apollo computer is more powerful? And have any evidence? I'd be surprised if you can get a microcontroller with as little processing power these days.
- kolinko 5y agoI think the downvotes come because you keep saying that music cards use microcontroles, when they do not. Music cards use dedicated chips, they are not general purpose, and they don’t really do much computation aside from a few counters. AFAIK. Now, in DIY tutorials they show microcontrollers, because they are easier to obtain, but it doesn’t mean that they are used in the commercial products.
- nl 5y agoI realise they don't use microcontrollers, but the Apollo Guidance Computer only had ~12,000 transistors[1]. The cheapest, smallest (15s storage) "chip corder" (which is what these cards use) has GPIO, SPI, the ability to trigger different messages etc. There's no way this is under 12,000 transistors![2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_co... [2] https://www.datasheets.com/en/part-details/isd2115ayyi-nuvoton-technology-corporation-61615792#datasheet https://www.datasheets.com/en/part-details/isd2115ayyi-nuvot...
- formerly_proven 5y agoThose ICs don't have any compute capacity at all. They're an analog oscillator driving an address counter connected to an OTP ROM whose data pins go into a DAC.
- rrrazdan 5y agoCitation please? That sounds unlikely!
- schlupa 5y agoMmmmh, AGC was not that low level. It was a 16 bit computer, running at 1Mhz with 72 Kb of ROM and 4 Kb of RAM.
- notwedtm 5y agoThis reminds me of the fact that 54% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
- brainless 5y agoThank you, I think I am just gonna quit my work now and spend the day thinking about it walking around and being anxious too. Sometimes it takes a while to understand how far we have come with miniaturization of tech.
- Nextgrid 5y ago> Ubiquitous computing, what will it bring us? Ads, obviously.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoWhen adblocking software becomes indistinguishable from stealth technology.
- handrous 5y agoUbiquitous spyware in everything we interact with, in order to make ads, on average, 5% more efficient—juuuuust enough more efficient that having a stream of massive-scale spyware data is necessary to compete in the ad sales market. Totally a good trade-off, making all the world's computing adversarial so ads work slightly better.
- npteljes 5y ago>Ubiquitous computing, what will it bring us? Ads, propaganda and surveillance.
- teekert 5y agoI'm sorry you had to go through your childhood without Star Trek ;)
- numpad0 5y agoThe concept of digital advertisement was unknown to Humans in ST universe until Ferengis brought an example to Federation Starbase Deep Space 9 in 2372, so that’s one divergence between our universe and Star Trek version of it.
- lanerobertlane 5y agoOff topic, but Deep Space 9 was not a federation starbase. It was a Bajorian Republic station under Federation administration following the Cardassian withdrawal.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoSao Paulo did away with public advertising for a couple decades. I believe it is creeping back in now. But it can be done.
- sn41 5y ago
- tomxor 5y ago> our light bubs have more powerful computers than the first computer many of us once owned Mine don't, and I first owned an AtariST with a 68000 CPU. These are "smart bulbs". We are still in the .com bubble of IoT, so there are going to be a lot of silly things we can run Doom on for a while until it dies down. Lights don't need computers to operate, but that doesn't stop people trying to add "features" to lights with computers.
- nabla9 5y agoIn 2018 IBM already demoed 1mm x 1mm sized computer on chip concept for crypto anchor that almost can almost run Doom.
- simias 5y agoA problem with this from my point of view is that while hardware engineers did an incredible job increasing the processing power of our thinking rocks, us software devs did a tremendous job of squandering 90% of it away. Of course there also are market incentives for doing so (time to market, dev costs etc...). Empirically it seems that software simply doesn't scale as well as hardware does. I feel like this overhead would make "smart dust" impractical. Or I guess I could put it that way: one hand hand you could be impressed that a modern light bulb can run Doom, on the other you could be alarmed that you need a Doom-capable computer to run a modern light bulb.
- noir_lord 5y agoThe problem is that the extreme effort to optimise hardware pays off for everyone, the extreme effort to optimise "random software project" rarely does (unless random software project is a compiler/kernel of course). So the RoI is just different.
- neolog 5y agoBrowsers too
- noir_lord 5y agoIndeed, browsers are a good example of ubiquitous software.
- funcDropShadow 5y agoAnd they contain a compiler and almost an operating system ;-)
- pwagland 5y agoWell, yes and no… as always! The trick is that you probably don't need all, or even most, of that power to run the light. Sure the Zigbee protocol is _probably_ being done via software, and not a dedicated chip, but even then. The big thing is that this chip is most likely so cheap, especially in bulk, that it doesn't make sense to get the "cheaper" variant, even if that was still available. This is kind of supported by the "new" Trådfri having an updated chip, even though the Trådfri line never changed it's capabilities, it was probably cheaper to get the new more powerful chip and/or they could no longer get the old one with a five year supply guarantee.
- torginus 5y agoI remember reading about some circuit where they replaced an 555 timer whose job was to generate a PWM signal with a fully featured microcontroller, because it was cheaper that way.
- canadianfella 5y agoHow do you pronounce 555?
- clownpenis_fart 5y agowow. I don't think anyone realized that before. really makes u think
- m_st 5y agoWhile I'm a great fan of ubiquitous tech/computing in general, I must also say that it feels weird applying firmware updates to light bulbs. However, you want to stay safe these days, so it's better to keep up to date, right?
- flyinghamster 5y agoUnfortunately, my experience has been that Ikea will push out a firmware update, and then I don't discover it until the outside lights fail to turn on or off at their appointed time and have to be rebooted. Yes, we live in an age when you can reboot a light bulb. Very much to their credit, though, the Trådfri hub doesn't depend on a cloud service just to operate. If that ever happens, thus endeth my foray into smart lighting. I've put my foot down: if it needs Somebody Else's Computer to function, I don't want it.
- soheil 5y agoGiven how computation is more and more energy efficient and requires near zero material to build, will there be a day that we consider computing cycles a priori a bad thing? Maybe there will be an argument about how terrible it is to have smart dust by those who consider it to be a new form of pollution and toxicity.
- brokenmachine 5y ago>Ubiquitous computing, what will it bring us? Ads. Oh, and spying/tracking. The future sucks.
- zelon88 5y agoI believe there is a point at which we will be emulating silicon so fast that we will be able to realize true Single Instruction Set computing. Such a machine would be nowhere near as efficient as a CISC computer in terms of work per clock cycle, but what if our "silicon" in the future can run an almost arbitrary frequency? We would be able to emulate any instruction set natively in real time. The perfect FPGA.