• Dayroom7485@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      I want those fuckers powering little submarines that fight cancer cells right now - but realistically speaking, these microcontrollers would need to be at least one order two order of magnitude smaller for that, no?

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    In broad terms, that seems to put it about on par with an Intel 386 chip from 1985

    At 24 MHz, it’s actually about 4-6 times faster than a full fledged 33 MHz i80386DX with 10 times as many transistors back in the day.
    It’s absolutely insane that i386 remained the standard with its inferior high latency design.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

    exhibiting BASIC language performance ten times faster than a newly introduced 80386-based computer

    That was an 8MHz Arm system, and it was commonly recognized as being clearly faster than a 33MHz i80386DX!
    In fact the 8036 was so inefficient at 33MHz it couldn’t even beat the speed of a 16 MHz 80286 on 16 bit code!!
    Mips, Alpha, Motorola, Sparc and finally Arm were all better, but they weren’t backed by IBM, and the availability of clones made the PC relatively cheap. But basically everything else was better than Intel.

    Unfortunately Arm also lacked a math co-processor, so for tasks that were heavy on FP calculations, an i386 with co-processor was superior.
    Also Arm was unable to sell them cheap enough to capture at least a niche market. (Apart from education in UK)
    And for the hobbyist an Amiga was way cheaper, and had powerful graphics and sound chips.

    • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      Thank you. This kind of information was exactly what I wanted in the comments.

      As a person who started on a 286 this seems blazing fast. Just wish it had ports for power, HDMI and USB

      • ripcord@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        HDMI

        I don’t believe it has enough RAM for any real video, among other things.

  • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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    25 days ago

    This article was written by someone who only knows buzz words. They said it’s “not just the silicon(edited from silicone), but the entire microcontroller” what do they think processors have other than silicone?

    Edit: silicone->silicon

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.uk
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      25 days ago

      They’re referencing the package as a whole, plastic casing, gold internal wiring, etc. and the silicon die in the center of it all.

      • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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        24 days ago

        This still makes no sense, because the gold wiring is a huge cost. Why dafuq wouldn’t current manufacturing encourage smaller packages? And there has been a push to make things thinner since ad memorium, so why wouldn’t they have made the die slimmer?

        Edit: good to know the hive mind still exists.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
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          25 days ago

          You’re asking why they didn’t make the package thinner than like .1mm thick…?

          Or are you commenting on some sense of surprise that someone would want to make small things, or something? If so, not sure what you’re referring to.

            • ripcord@lemmy.world
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              25 days ago

              Sure there is.

              As far as I know this is the smallest full microcontroller package on the market. Which is what makes it interesting and why we are here talking about it.

              Are there others?