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Interesting how a modern USB Bluetooth dongle is more powerful than a proper computer from 40 years ago, and much smaller as well.
by mcotocel 5y ago
Interesting how a modern USB Bluetooth dongle is more powerful than a proper computer from 40 years ago, and much smaller as well.
- Arrath 5y agoReminds me of the article on HN some months ago where someone got a form of Lunix running on the controller SoC within a hard drive. Incredible what power is being packed into other devices, these days.
- awesomepeter 5y agoWhy lunix? I assume you mean Linux, I've seen it written this way a few times and am wondering where it comes from
- luke2m 5y agohttps://adequacy-org.vercel.app/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html https://adequacy-org.vercel.app/public/stories/2001.12.2.420...
- PeterisP 5y agohttp://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack perhaps, with the backdoor that adds an extra user when /etc/shadow is read from the drive?
- Arrath 5y agoThat's the one I was thinking of!
- jagger27 5y agoApples USB-C charging bricks are quite capable on their own. The new 140W brick uses a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0 STM32G0-series microcontroller with 36K RAM, 128K flash ROM, running at 64MHz. Source: 9:45 minute mark of the video in this article: https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/29/teardown-shows-details-of-apples-new-140w-usb-c-charger-for-16-inch-macbook-pro/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/29/teardown-shows-details-of-app...
- philistine 5y agoAt some point Apple is going to start putting S-series chip in those chargers.
- bombela 5y agoWhat can you possibly do to need such computing power for a switching power supply... I wonder
- pantalaimon 5y agoSTM32G0 is as already the lowest end current MCU line from ST (if you ignore the STM8 line of 8-bit MCUs)
- jagger27 5y agoUSB PD is a fairly complex protocol. I can safely plug my phone into my MacBook charger now because both ends can negotiate a suitable power level. We’re not just doing 5V 1A anymore. The CPU they chose is probably a little overkill, but it’s nicer than 8-bit microcontrollers to write programs for since it’s just Arm. Who knows, maybe they have a bunch of internal sensors and can intelligently react to high temperatures or moisture.
- mavhc 5y agoHave you tried turning your charger off and on again?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoAlso interesting is how, given that, we still have slow and unresponsive software that often isn't doing much more than we did 40 years ago.
- fhood 5y agoWe use additional compute power to enable frameworks and abstractions that allow code to be written faster. Sure it's bloated but at least there is a reason.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoIs code actually being written faster? Or with fewer people? I am not convinced that it is.
- AussieWog93 5y agoYeah, this is my experience too. I view it more as beauracracy; in order to get my job done I now also have to understand a whole lot of arbitrary systems created by a group of programmers on the other side of the world. If you break out of the desktop/mobile environment and into embedded, it's genuinely liberating.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoone thing to consider is that the types of people writing code are very different. In the 80s it took geniuses to write a simple videogame within ram constraints. Now that is a feasible final project for an intro CS class.
- AussieWog93 5y agoI don't think it did. Electrical engineers still write incredibly low-level code in embedded programming courses - we did some pretty interesting shit in MIPS assembler before we even touched C++ - and I doubt we were any smarter than the CompSci kids. I think it's primarily a cultural difference - modern CompSci people love treating everything as an academic exercise and hand-waving away complexity, whereas the old-school "hackers" (before CompSci was really a huge thing) would love getting into the nitty-gritty of things and didn't really give a damn about whether or not they were following best practices. If the average CompSci student (who, to be fair, is smart but not Genius-level) spent as much time reading the spec sheet for the Motorola 68000 as they did learning how and when a Turing Machine halts, they'd have no issue understanding 80's video game code.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 8fingerlouie 5y agoI worked on the kernel parts of the pre smart phones. When GSM was invented, there was real doubt that it might not be possible to meet the very specific timing needs on the hardware that was available at the time. I remember when we had to integrate Bluetooth into our 16 bit, 8Mhz Infineon E-gold platform. We had ~20 people working on it for 2 years.
- elurg 5y agoDoom is less that 30 years old and was resource-intensive for the time.