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Doom has been ported to an earbud

doombuds.com

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Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#131

Post by fennecbutt »

Telemakhos wrote: post #25
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CPU: Dual-core 300MHz ARM Cortex-M4F It's absolute bonkers amount of hardware scaling that happened since Doom was released. Yes, this is a tremendous overkill here, but the crazy part here is that this fits into an earpiece.

I remember playing Doom on a single-core 25MHz 486 laptop. It was, at the time, an amazing machine, hundreds of times more powerful than the flight computer that ran the Apollo space capsule, and now it is outclassed by an earbud.

And by an order of magnitude or more, too!

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#132

Post by fennecbutt »

npsomaratna wrote: post #22

On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3). I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.

I think what really happened is that as Carmack became more senior he got more and more out of touch with the technology. So I don't understand why people still refer to his words as gospel, especially since the domain he's now in is so far outside of his original specialty.

Doom 2016 would've never been possible with him at the helm. Then again now they're adding viking bullshit to it so design by executive committee kills yet another beloved franchise.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#133

Post by AlecSchueler »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #129
AlecSchueler wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cease production.

Why are you on a technology site?

I'm not sure why you're asking this or what you're insinuating. The site is called Hacker News, it should be open to anarcho- and eco- hackers too. Not all of believe in infinite growth.

Do you want to expand on why you're on this site?

I've been here for more than 15 years and I'm not the person I was when I signed up or when I went through life in a startup.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#134

Post by estimator7292 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #58
rogerrogerr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a third option - an economic success that economies of scale have made massively capable hardware the cheapest option for many applications, despite being overkill.

Or the fourth option, an environmental disaster all around

You have to use a chip, and no matter what kind of chip you're paying for the same raw resources.

I don't think you have an actual argument here, you just want to be indignant and contrarian.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#135

Post by daft_pink »

ornornor wrote: post #61
daft_pink wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the bottom of the page, it’s an advertisement for someone looking for a job to show off his technical skill.

Okay? Is that good or bad or what?

It’s good. I’m just countering the comment above its argument that this is a sign that people do useless things.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#136

Post by estimator7292 »

nehalem wrote: post #15

Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.

A wireless earbud is closer in complexity to a WiFi router than a digital wristwatch.

Bluetooth is complicated. Noise canceling is complicated. Audio compression is complicated. Simply being an RF device is complicated.

It is an unfortunate physical reality that it requires a lot of processing to do all the jobs a Bluetooth earbud has to do. The incredible engineering success is that we can put a GHz class CPU in each earbud and all of that crazy processing happens on microwatts of power.

Putting supercomputers in your ears is mildly absurd on the face of it, but consider that we now have supercomputers that are so small, cheap, and energy efficient that we can put them and their batteries in our ears.

Besides, what's more wasteful, one silicon die or two? It a cortex CPU more wasteful than a 555 timer on equivalent die space? Is it more resource efficient to pay 10x more for a 2x larger die using 40x power and a bigger battery to go with it? Or is it most efficient to use the smallest, most efficient die, and the smallest battery you can get away with?

In the grand scheme of things, the "wasted" resources in the chip are essentially nil. You save far, far more resources by using more efficient processing. It's a few milligrams of silicon, carbon, and minerals. You should be far, far more concerned about the lithium batteries ending up in landfills.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#139

Post by Guvante »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #55
Guvante wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't realize that games were small back then because they had to be. The value of being small for most users almost doesn't exist. If you have bandwidth limits then yeah download size is important but most don't. So the only meaningful change optimizations make is "will it run well enough" and "does it fit on my disk". Put more plainly "if it works at all it doesn't matter" is how most consumers (probabl…

Storage space is at a premium. The PS5 has about 650gb of usable space. At ~100gb/game which is not uncommon you can store 6 games on the console without needing to free up hard drive space. Filesize matters, especially to people with limited bandwidth and data caps. The increasing cost of SSDs only makes this situation more hardware constrained.

Do you have six games you are actively playing? That is more than most. And 100gb is not an average to my understanding sure there are AAA games that go over that but it isn't like you need to swap between a bunch of those. (Also they tend to be set piece so not something you go back to)

Again I agree optimization is good just pointing out it tends to not impact people. "My default driver can only handle six full game downloads" isn't actually a blocker to most people playing a PS5.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#140

Post by NuclearPM »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #58
rogerrogerr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a third option - an economic success that economies of scale have made massively capable hardware the cheapest option for many applications, despite being overkill.

Or the fourth option, an environmental disaster all around

What do you mean? Earbud are environmental disasters?
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