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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: 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.