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Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

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Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#161

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

thombat wrote: post #111
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #83

Whenever one of my developers tells me that my phone is too slow when their app lags on my Android 4.1 phone, I tell them the specs of Apollo 11 computer and scold them for being unable to deliver a smoothly scrolling list of messages on a freaking supercomputer in my palm.

But do you also give them a free hand to implement the entire stack below to meet that goal, along with the budgeting advice "waste anything but time"?

That is overkill, and in the end they manage to deliver an acceptable results.

You see, the problem of app developers, especially in big companies, is that they are given a top-notch smartphones, so they naturally target such hardware as a benchmark for performance, which moves every year. That's why a 2016 Moto Z play smartphone ran smoothly in 2016, but works really slow in 2020 - because all the regular apps (Gmail, Chrome, FB, etc) were updated with newer flagship smartphones in mind. "New build works really fast on my new Pixel 4", the Gmail developer thinks, "ship in to production!"

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#162

Post by fulafel »

jballer wrote: post #119
xp84 wrote: post #114

I'd like to also see an article examining these computing power attributes on the piece of garbage embedded computer on the front of the gas pumps where the lag between registering every keypress is like 800ms, and every screen redraw takes about 2000ms. It takes me an extra 60 seconds to get gas now thanks to how slow these things are, and it is nearly universal despite whether they appear to be 20 year old or new d…

Maybe California mandates the delay to discourage gas consumption...

This could actually be a good mechanism, it disincentivises people of (nearly) all incomes than flat taxes.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#163

Post by seszett »

lunias wrote: post #134
xp84 wrote: post #114

I'd like to also see an article examining these computing power attributes on the piece of garbage embedded computer on the front of the gas pumps where the lag between registering every keypress is like 800ms, and every screen redraw takes about 2000ms. It takes me an extra 60 seconds to get gas now thanks to how slow these things are, and it is nearly universal despite whether they appear to be 20 year old or new d…

You forgot: Would you like a receipt? (wait) It makes no sense at all. As soon as you input payment it should output gas. There's really no need for buttons or a screen at all (well, maybe except for entering a zip). If they really have to show all that stuff, it can come after I have my gas. Note: languages aren't slow, it's the programs that are slow.

I'm a bit surprised to see the comments here on automated gas station pumps. I've used quite a few different ones in a few different countries of Europe (where I go outside Europe, usually the stations are not automated so I can't compare) and I have never had this kind of slow experience.

Here in Belgium I don't even get asked if I want a receipt, I can just ask it afterwards if I like (just like for the rewards card). The worst I've had were in store French supermarket stations where for a while they had audio ads playing while you were filling up, that was absolutely horrible and I stopped going there. Eventually those things went away.

But the interface itself always asks for the least possible things. Diesel/gasoline 95/gasoline 98 then the card PIN, and you can fill up.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#164

Post by Dylan16807 »

extrapickles wrote: post #92
dfox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming reasonable charger design (ie. at least some overcurrent protection) the internal ESD protection of USB-C port in the device that only ever expects 5V (think SRV05-4) should be more than enough to safely trip the overcurrent protection in the charger (or overload it enough that the destroyed component is the charger and not the device). On the other hand there are documented cases of USB-C PD between two dev…

The problem is that the ESD protection can only stop short duration spikes. The device would have to have a fuse (or other overcurrent protection) to prevent the 20V @ 5A as allowed in the USB spec from destroying the ESD circuit.

A USB port should always have a polyfuse. And active disconnect isn't hard either.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#166

Post by nolok »

xp84 wrote: post #114

I'd like to also see an article examining these computing power attributes on the piece of garbage embedded computer on the front of the gas pumps where the lag between registering every keypress is like 800ms, and every screen redraw takes about 2000ms. It takes me an extra 60 seconds to get gas now thanks to how slow these things are, and it is nearly universal despite whether they appear to be 20 year old or new d…

Weren't a lot of those windows ce back in the day? So regular c/cpp/... Apps under the hood, just terrible ones and on asthmatic hardware

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#168

Post by nolok »

stevenwoo wrote: post #143
xp84 wrote: post #114

I'd like to also see an article examining these computing power attributes on the piece of garbage embedded computer on the front of the gas pumps where the lag between registering every keypress is like 800ms, and every screen redraw takes about 2000ms. It takes me an extra 60 seconds to get gas now thanks to how slow these things are, and it is nearly universal despite whether they appear to be 20 year old or new d…

I’ve seen a few with the Windows BSOD but not enough info to figure out what’s otherwise going on.

Like atm and other common access point : used to be windows ce under the hood. Since the new line it can be windows 10 now, it's lightweight / embed version offers a kiosk mode (pick an app and the account at boot auto login and auto start the app and refuse anything that takes focus from the app basically... Except when something crash then you might see the underlying parts)

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#169

Post by Dylan16807 »

masklinn wrote: post #147
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #83

Whenever one of my developers tells me that my phone is too slow when their app lags on my Android 4.1 phone, I tell them the specs of Apollo 11 computer and scold them for being unable to deliver a smoothly scrolling list of messages on a freaking supercomputer in my palm.

Yes because the AGC was well known for its smoothly scrolling message lists on its large high-density display.

Are you actually trying to argue that smooth scrolling is hard, and specifically because of the display size?

On the CPU side, you can figure out how to position a line of text in less than 100 instructions if you store it right. But even if you use 10 million instructions to lay out a handful of lines, you'll never have to hitch.

On the GPU side, the pre-retina A5 had a fill rate of 2 billion pixels per second, and a brand new high-DPI phone has 100-200 million pixels per second to draw at 60fps. Let alone comparing like to like. A high-end qualcomm chip from 2013-2014 would match that, and a low end phone would have half the power and half the pixels.

We are in a wonderful age of overpowered GPUs for 2D work. There are no excuses for dropped frames.

Re: Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers

#170

Post by hnuser123456 »

ghaff wrote: post #53
bloopernova wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of fun technical rundowns, I've idly wondered: - Approximately which year's average desktop PC is equivalent to a current Raspberry Pi? - What year's worldwide computing power is equivalent to a current Raspberry Pi? I'm sure folks can come up with other comparisons to make. I know it's not very useful to the world, but it's fun to think of just how much astonishing compute power we have these days.

For the first question, probably somewhere in the mid-2000s. Maybe early Core microarchitecture.

I'll give you a mid-2000s Celeron, before core, except 4 of them because it's a quad core, and with a few times more RAM since you can get pis with up to 4GB now. I had a 1.8Ghz single-core celeron with 512MB of RAM in 2005, upgraded to 3.0GHz with 768MB by 2006, then leaped to a Q6600/4GB in 2007. Not sure how my Radeon 9200 and later X1600 would've compared to the Pi GPU though.

This guy puts the rpi 4's GPU at 8 GFLOPS:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244519

Looks like the X1600 was around 6 GFLOPS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin...

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