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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

#71

Post by Aurornis »

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

It’s the opposite. Using an off the shelf MCU is much more efficient than trying to spin your own ASIC.

Doing the work in software allows for updates and bug fixes, which are more likely to prevent piles of hardware from going into the landfill (in some cases before they even reach customers’ hands).

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#72

Post by AlecSchueler »

dubbie99 wrote: post #66
AlecSchueler wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the fourth option, an environmental disaster all around

The materials that go into a chip are nothing. The process of making the chip is roughly the same no matter the power of it. So having one chip that can satisfy a large range of customers needs is so much better than wasting development time making a custom just good enough chip for each.

> The materials that go into a chip are nothing.

They really aren't. Every material that goes into every chip needs to be sourced from various mines around the world, shipped to factories to be assembled, then the end goods need to be shipped again around the world to be sold or directly dumped.

High power, low power, it all has negative environmental impact.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#73

Post by Aurornis »

nehalem wrote: post #26
varjag wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its knees.

No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

FPGAs are not cost efficient at all for something like this.

MCUs are so cheap that you’d never get to a cheaper solution by building out a team to iterate on custom hardware until it was bug free and ready to scale. You’d basically be reinventing the MCU that can be bought for $0.10, but with tens of millions of dollars of engineering and without economies of scale that the MCU companies have.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#75

Post by sdenton4 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #63
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.

I imagine it’s far more economical to have one foundry that can make a general purpose chip that’s overpowered for 95% of uses than to try to make a ton of different chips. It speaks to how a lot of the actual cost is the manufacturing and R&D.

The only real problem I could see is if the general purpose microcontroller is significantly more power-hungry than a specialized chip, impacting the battery life of the earbuds.

On every other axis, though, it's likely a very clear win: reusable chips means cheaper units, which often translates into real resource savings (in the extreme case, it may save an entire additional factory for the custom chips, saving untold energy and effort.)

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#76

Post by direwolf20 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #72
dubbie99 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The materials that go into a chip are nothing. The process of making the chip is roughly the same no matter the power of it. So having one chip that can satisfy a large range of customers needs is so much better than wasting development time making a custom just good enough chip for each.

> The materials that go into a chip are nothing. They really aren't. Every material that goes into every chip needs to be sourced from various mines around the world, shipped to factories to be assembled, then the end goods need to be shipped again around the world to be sold or directly dumped. High power, low power, it all has negative environmental impact.

Which materials are they and how would you suggest doing it with fewer materials?

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#77

Post by danielbln »

ck2 wrote: post #62
danielbln wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already very cheap to build though. We are able to pack a ton of processing into a tiny form factor for little money (comparatively, ignoring end-consumer margins etc.). An earbud that does ANC, supports multiple different audio standard including low battery standby, is somewhat resistant to interference, can send and receive over many meters. That's awesome for the the price. That it has enough processing to r…

I need that in lunar-lander exponents (imagine the lunar lander computer being an earbud ha)

Well, current smartphone would be about 10^8 times faster/more than the lunar lander.

A single Airpod would be about 10^4 times as powerful as the entire lunar lander guidance system.

Or to put another way: a single Airpod would outcompute the entire Soviet Union's space program.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#78

Post by stackghost »

direwolf20 wrote: post #76
AlecSchueler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The materials that go into a chip are nothing. They really aren't. Every material that goes into every chip needs to be sourced from various mines around the world, shipped to factories to be assembled, then the end goods need to be shipped again around the world to be sold or directly dumped. High power, low power, it all has negative environmental impact.

Which materials are they and how would you suggest doing it with fewer materials?

In theory, graphene based semiconductors would eliminate a lot of need for shipping and mining.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#79

Post by arin-s »

RandomTeaParty wrote: post #65
arin-s wrote: post #2

Hi, I ported DOOM to the Pinebuds Pro earbuds. It's accessible over the internet, so you can join the queue and play DOOM on my earbuds from your PC! More info as well as links to the github repos can be found on the site.

What compression ratio does your jpeg encoding achieve?

It ranges from 5.8:1 to 4.7:1 depending on scene complexity. Keep in mind I calculated these values using the 8-bit pallete-based framebuffer that DOOM uses, not a 24-bit one that a regular RGB buffer would use.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#80

Post by compiler-devel »

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

Nobody cares, unless they’re commenting for an easy win on internet message boards.
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