A few more years and some more ram on these earbuds and we'll be able to run some nice local earbud kubernetes clusters
Doom has been ported to an earbud
41–50 of 143 posts
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#42Whenever 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.
Incredible to see people try to spin the wild successes of market based economies as an economic failure.
Hardware is cheap and small enough that we can run doom on an earbud, and I’m supposed to think this is a bad thing?
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#43Whenever 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.
Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity, whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more (free) compute.
It's also a triumph of the previous generation of programmers to be able to make interesting games that took so little compute.
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#44Whenever 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.
Incredible to see people try to spin the wild successes of market based economies as an economic failure. Hardware is cheap and small enough that we can run doom on an earbud, and I’m supposed to think this is a bad thing?
I can sort of see one angle for it, and the parent story kind of supports it. Bad software is a forcing function for good hardware - the worse that software has gotten in the past few decades the better hardware has had to get to support it. Such that if you actually tried like OP did, you can do some pretty crazy things on tiny hardware these days. Imagine what we could do on computers if they weren't so bottlenecked doing things they don't need to do.
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#45Whenever 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.
Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity, whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more (…
There are enough atoms in that earbud to replace all of the world's computers.
We've got a long way to go.
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#46Whenever 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.
Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity, whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more (…
Plus there’s actually less waste, I would imagine, by using a generic, very efficiently mass produced, but way overkill part. vs. a one off or very specific, rare but perfectly matched part.
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#47Earlier 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.
Can we finally end this Apollo computer comparison forever? It was a real time computer NOT designed for speed but real time operations.1
Why don't you compare it to let's say pdp11, vax780/11 or Cray 1 supercomputer?
NASA used a lot of supercomputers here on earth pior to mission start.
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#48We should definitely send a playable copy of doom to aliens on a golden record on the next Voyager mission
and risk having them interpret it as a declaration of war?
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#49Whenever 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.
Marginal cost of a small microprocessor in an ASIC is nothing.
The RAM costs a little bit, but if you want to firmware update in a friendly way, etc, you need some RAM to stage the updates.
Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud
#50I am a bit said that it is always Doom. Now ... I played the game when I was young. It was addictive. I don't think it was a good game but it was addictive. And somewhat simple. So what is the problem then? Well ... games have gotten a lot bigger, often more complicated. Trying to port that to small platforms is close to impossible. This makes me sad. I think the industry, excluding indie tech/startups, totally lost…
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