4 ms·
Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compare
by varjag 9mo ago
Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its knees.
- nehalem 9mo agoNo doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.
- Aurornis 9mo ago> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA. FPGAs are not cost efficient at all for something like this. MCUs are so cheap that you’d never get to a cheaper solution by building out a team to iterate on custom hardware until it was bug free and ready to scale. You’d basically be reinventing the MCU that can be bought for $0.10, but with tens of millions of dollars of engineering and without economies of scale that the MCU companies have.
- nicoburns 9mo ago> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply Where are you imagining costy savings coming from? Custom anything is almost always vastly more expensive than using a standardised product.
- grishka 9mo agoThese sorts of things feel like they would be quite inefficient on a general-purpose CPU so you would want to do them on some sort of dedicated DSP hardware instead. So I would expect an earbud to use some sort of specialized microcontroller with a slow-ish CPU core but extra peripherals to do all the signal processing and bluetooth-related stuff.