Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 17 2020, @04:06AM   Printer-friendly

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday February 17 2020, @08:46AM (2 children)

    by stormwyrm (717) on Monday February 17 2020, @08:46AM (#959078) Journal

    Aerospace hardware is generally rated for reliability under far harsher conditions than hardware intended for terrestrial use, and as such it's usually several generations behind its terrestrial counterparts. For example, the ESA's Solar Orbiter uses the ERC-32SC [cpushack.com], a radiation-hardened SPARCv7 architecture processor which runs at 25 MHz and fabricated with a 0.8 µm CMOS process. Technology like that was considered state of the art around 1987... That for a space probe that was launched just last week! Too bad that Sun Microsystems is now defunct, as we now have a space probe running on a SPARC microprocessor similar to those they designed and used in their old Unix workstations literally off to study the sun. Reliability is far more important than high performance in such applications, and there's only so much performance you can get when your hardware has to endure the temperature and radiation extremes of space. It's thus not surprising that even the most mundane modern-day hardware is so much more powerful than the hardware used for the Apollo program.

    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 1) by agr on Monday February 17 2020, @12:56PM

    by agr (7134) on Monday February 17 2020, @12:56PM (#959136)

    The original comparison is fair. The AGC was state of the art in terms of processing power per pound. It wasn’t a slowed down version of anything. It was the first computer to successfully use integrated circuits and its magnetic core memory was largely immune to radiation. Computers have come that far. Even the large IBM System/360 mainframes used in Mission Control are dwarfed in processing power by a Raspberry Pi.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday February 17 2020, @02:12PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Monday February 17 2020, @02:12PM (#959158) Journal