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, Funny) by legont on Monday February 17 2020, @04:32AM (2 children)
Once upon a time, life was simple.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Monday February 17 2020, @05:17AM (1 child)
Next Sunday A.D.: brain emulation on zettascale single board computers.
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(Score: 4, Funny) by legont on Monday February 17 2020, @06:09AM
I fear agile security devops.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @04:33AM (6 children)
These USB chips wouldn't have survived getting off through the atmosphere.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday February 17 2020, @05:00AM
Commercial off-the-shelf hardware can work in space. It's just not something you want to trust astronauts' lives to, probably.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-in-space/ [raspberrypi.org]
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 17 2020, @09:06AM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @12:17PM (2 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 17 2020, @01:21PM (1 child)
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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @07:18PM
most of them won't survive getting mailed.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday February 17 2020, @05:09AM (5 children)
Almost every new computer is more powerful. Your car has a more powerful computer, likely multiple of them. The crappy PineTime [pine64.org] which is orders of magnitude slower than Apple Watch is more powerful than the AGC.
Next in line could be nanobots. Trillions of individual disposable injectable nanobots, each more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer so they can scan things and zap them with lasers.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by legont on Monday February 17 2020, @06:14AM
Yeah, I can see Chineese made bots in my blood stream reacting to the US sanctions.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Mer on Monday February 17 2020, @08:27AM (1 child)
And despite all that text editors still manage to take ages to open.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @04:27AM
> text editors still manage to take ages to open.
Really? I use microEmacs and it's open instantly. And I'm using an ancient Win7 laptop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @10:07PM (1 child)
Traditionally, those would be sharks.
But I find trillions of sharks hardly injectable.
Do you think you can change the zapping mechanism?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 18 2020, @12:44AM
Toothy mechanical cell poppin'.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @05:13AM (1 child)
Less powerful but it only cost thrippence ha'penny and a quarter farthing.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @05:34AM
In American English? Is that like a buck two eighty?
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @05:24AM (2 children)
Clickbait and factually wrong.
If you go this route at least make the page backgreound yellow.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @06:27AM
[citation needed]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 17 2020, @06:33AM
So that it stands out and grabs the attention of more people?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday February 17 2020, @08:46AM (2 children)
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.
(Score: 1) by agr on Monday February 17 2020, @12:56PM
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
We need something like this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing [ieee.org]
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