This USB-C Charger's Chip Is More Powerful Than the Apollo 11 Flight Computer:
As we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing last year, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) became a particularly juicy target. The analysis, of course, showed just how much more powerful the chips used in common smartphones are than the computers that got us to the moon. Not too shocking, but amazing nonetheless.
For fun, Forrest Heller, a software engineer at Apple who previously worked on Occipital's Structure 3D scanner, thought he'd cast around for a different comparison. How would far more basic chips, say, the ones in USB-C chargers, compare to the AGC?
Heller took a deep and detailed look and came to a fairly startling conclusion—even these modest chips can easily go toe-to-toe with the computer that got us to the moon.
[...] Now, this isn't to slander the Apollo Guidance Computer [(AGC)]. Not at all. The AGC was amazing.
Without the AGC, no human pilot could have kept the Apollo spacecraft on course to the moon and back. Probably most incredible was how much it did with how little. You might say a USB-C charger is the opposite: Notable for how little it does with how much.
And that's really the point, isn't it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by agr on Monday February 17 2020, @08:32AM
The good news is that computers have improved greatly in the past 50 years—by 7 or 8 orders of magnitude. The original AGC budget was 1 cubic foot, 100 pounds and 100 watts, btw. The bad news is that we now have lunar-mission capable computers in our cables. Another place to hide malware. How can any organization audit all its cables? It’s the computer security version of the coronavirus, easy to spread, hard to diagnose and potentially deadly.