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This USB-C Charger’s Chip is More Powerful Than the Apollo 11 Flight Computer

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

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

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

 
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 17 2020, @09:06AM (3 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday February 17 2020, @09:06AM (#959084) Homepage
    Shielding's been invented. Cosmic rays interact with matter - if you want the matter that matters to not be interacted with, just put more other matter around it. You can attenuate the noise by 5 orders of magnitude just by putting it inside a kilo of shielding (the working part of the chip itself is a hundredth of a gram). Or you could buy a system with the milspec version of the chip: http://mil-embedded.com/articles/armed-ready/ . Or you could have 3 of the systems, and vote on the output (which is what happens inside the memory subsystems of milspec chips typically). These are solved problems.
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @12:17PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @12:17PM (#959123)
    Radiation isn't your only enemy in space: since the only way to transfer heat in space is by radiation (a singularly crummy way to do it) high-performance, hot-running circuits are difficult in space applications. I suppose that's another reason why the hardware used in space applications generally tends to be 20-30 years behind the terrestrial state of the art. For example, the CPU of the New Horizons probe is a MIPS R3000 that runs at around a third to half of the clock speed of the original PlayStation's CPU. The ESA Solar Orbiter launched just last week uses CPUs that are comparable in performance to those used by Sun workstations from the late eighties (SPARC V7 and V8). The Cassini–Huygens probe used a MIL-STD-1750A CPU, a 16-bit microprocessor whose design dates to 1980.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 17 2020, @01:21PM (1 child)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 17 2020, @01:21PM (#959138) Journal

      Radiation isn't your only enemy in space: since the only way to transfer heat in space is by radiation (a singularly crummy way to do it) high-performance, hot-running circuits are difficult in space applications.

      You still have conductance and convection inside of the spacecraft. And in a spacecraft actively expending significant mass of propellant, you can dump heat to the propellant (otherwise chemical rocket engines would be a really bad idea). If you don't have that, then yes, heating the universe via heat radiation is it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @01:34AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @01:34AM (#959383)
        Most satellites and space probes don't actively expend propellant for most of their service life.