Comment by freddie_mercury
3 days ago
The world DOES run on older hardware.
How new do you think the CPU in your bank ATM or car's ECU is?
3 days ago
The world DOES run on older hardware.
How new do you think the CPU in your bank ATM or car's ECU is?
Well I know the CPU in my laptop is already over 10 years old and still works good enough for everything I do.
My daily drivers at home are an i3-540 and and Athlon II X4. Every time something breaks down, I find it much cheaper to just buy a new part than to buy a whole new kit with motherboard/CPU/RAM.
I'm a sysadmin, so I only really need to log into other computers, but I can watch videos, browse the web, and do some programming on them just fine. Best ROI ever.
> I can watch videos
Can you watch H.265 videos? That's the one limitation I regularly hit on my computer (that I got for free from some company, is pretty old, but is otherwise good enough that I don't think I'll replace it until it breaks). I don't think I can play videos recorded on modern iPhones.
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Some of it does.
The chips in everyones pockets do a lot of compute and are relatively new though.
I'd be willing to bet that even a brand new iPhone has a surprising number of reasonably old pieces of hardware for Bluetooth, wifi, gyroscope, accelerometer, etc. Not everything in your phone changes as fast as the CPU.
There's a decent chance something in the room you're in right now is running an 8051 core.
Sure, if you think the world consists of cash transactions and whatever a car needs to think about.
If we're talking numbers, there are many, many more embedded systems than general purpose computers. And these are mostly built on ancient process nodes compared to the cutting edge we have today; the shiny octa-cores on our phones are supported by a myriad of ancilliary chips that are definitely not cutting edge.
We aren't talking numbers, though. Who cares about embedded? I mean that literally. This is computation invisible by design. If that were sufficient we wouldn't have smartphones.
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Doom can run on Apple's Lightning to HDMI adapter.
A USB charger is more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer: https://web.archive.org/web/20240101203337/https://forresthe...
Powerplants and planes still run on 80s hardware.
Modern planes do not, and many older planes have been retrofitted, in whole or in part, with more modern computers.
Some of the specific embedded systems (like the sensors that feed back into the main avionics systems) may still be using older CPUs if you squint, but it's more likely a modern version of those older designs.
Related: I wonder what cpu Artemis/Orion is using
IBM PowerPC 750X apparently, which was the CPU the Power Mac G3 used back in the day. Since it's going into space it'll be one of the fancy radiation-hardened versions which probably still costs more than your car though, and they run four of them in lockstep to guard against errors.
https://www.eetimes.com/comparing-tech-used-for-apollo-artem...
> fancy radiation-hardened versions
Ha! What's special about rad-hard chips is that they're old designs. You need big geometries to survive cosmic rays, and new chips all have tiny geometries.
So there are two solutions:
1. Find a warehouse full of 20-year old chips.
2. Build a fab to produce 20-year old designs.
Both approaches are used, and both approaches are expensive. (Approach 1 is expensive because as you eventually run out of chips they become very, very valuable and you end up having to build a fab anyway.)
There's more to it than just big geometries but that's a major part of the solution.
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I'm not sure what artemis or orion are, but you can blame defense contractors for this. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM or Lockheed, even if they deliver unimpressive results at massive cost.
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