• neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    “It does in fact run Doom”, he said before he snorted a line of his new favorite drug - a dark grey line of Megaflops.

    Wear your N95 around the next gen SoCs. We don’t know the effects of inhaling them (yet)

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    2 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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      2 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

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Now you got me remembering my 2MHz “big board” Z80 computer I put together in the 80s from a kit. First computer I ever owned. On first power-up nothing seemed to happen, then I turned up the monitor brightness and a choir of angels sang.

  • notgold@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    Just nuts that my 386 was to big to take on my pushy as a kid and now the same thing would get lost in my nose hairs

  • A_A@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Package options : 20-pin, 16-pin or 8-pin … but looking at Texas instrument website i did not find the pinout …

  • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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    1 day 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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      1 day 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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        21 hours 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.

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          Work on this stuff:

          Thermal reasons, having enough pins and routabke pads on the board so you can land them from the package, mechanical properties (strong enough not to get squished).

          We do what we do because it’s the cheapest way that covers the requirements and is still easy to assemble.

          We slowly move to smaller pitches, but they’re more expensive to deal with, you need more accuracy on your pick and place and the tolerances on your pads and soldermask are smaller.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
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          1 day 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.

          • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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            1 day ago

            I’m saying there is no reason to say this microcontroller is vastly different from current products on the market.

            • ripcord@lemmy.world
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              1 day 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?

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Same way you would in any other microcontroller application, but smaller, so the whole device can be smaller.

      Get small enough and we can really have those bloodstream robots.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      You could use it as the logic board for a micro drone, something the size of a dime perhaps. Or other applications where weight or space are extremely limited. Another example might be a medical implant of some sort, this is small enough that it could be a part of a device that is meant to be placed inside an artery, or an eyeball, or an ear canal.

    • Lumberjacked@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      I make specialty vehicle electronics. My immediate thought was very small and cheap sensors. Similar to tire pressure monitoring but wired with CAN or something similar.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      In small things. Probably not very feasible for hobby projects unless you can get it soldered on when the PCB is built.

    • Beacon@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      In any use where size and or weight is important. For example wearables and flying drones