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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

#91
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.

> 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.

Yes but also Doom is very very old.

I bought a kodak camera in 2000 (640x480 resolution) and even that could run Doom on it. Way back when. Actually playable with sounds and everything.

Here's an even older one running it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k-AnvqiKzjY

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#92
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ultra pure water production itself is responsible for untold amounts of hydroflouric acid and ammonia , and most etching processes have an F-Gas involved, and most plants that do this work have tremendously high energy (power) costs due to stability needs/hvac. it's not 'just sand'.

How would you suggest doing it with fewer materials?

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#93
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It was a real time computer NOT designed for speed but real time operations. More than anything, it was designed to be small and use little power. But these little ARM Cortex M4F that we're comparing to are also designed for embedded, possibly hard-real-time operations. And dominant factors in experience on playback through earbuds are response time and jitter. If the AGC could get a capsule to the moon doing hard…

I have thought about this a little more, and looked into things. Since NASA used the 360/91, and had a lot of 360's and 7900's... all of NASA's 60's computing couldn't quite fit into a single 486DX-25. You'd be more like 486DX2-100 era to replace everything comfortably, and you'd want a lot of RAM-- like 16MB.

It looks like NASA had 5 360/75's plus a 360/91 by the end, plus a few other computers.

The biggest 360/75's (I don't know that NASA had the highest spec model for all 5) were probably roughly 1/10th of a 486-100 plus 1 megabyte of RAM. The 360/91 that they had at the end was maybe 1/3rd of a 486-100 plus up to 6 megabytes of RAM.

Those computers alone would be about 85% of a 486-100. Everything else was comparatively small. And, of course, you need to include the benefits from getting results on individual jobs much faster, even if sustained max throughput is about the same. So all of NASA, by the late 60's, probably fits into one relatively large 486DX4-100.

Incidentally, one random bit of my family lore; my dad was an IBM man and knew a lot about 360's and OS/360. He received a call one evening from NASA during Apollo 13 asking for advice about how they could get a little bit more out of their machines. My mom was miffed about dinner being interrupted until she understood why :D

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#94
post #52

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.

This is the "little part" of what fits into an earpiece. Each of those cores is maybe 0.04 square millimeters of die on e.g. 28nm process. RAM takes some area, but that's dwarfed by the analog and power components and packaging. The marginal cost of the gates making up the processors is effectively zero.

so 1mm2 peppered by those cores at 300MHz will give you 4 Tflops. And whole 200mm wafer - 100 Petaflops, like 10 B200s, and just at less than $3K/wafer. Giving half area to memory we'll get 50 PFlops with 300Gb RAM. Power draw is like 10-20KW. So, giving these numbers i'd guess Cerebras has tremendous margin and is just printing money :)

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#95

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.

[dead]

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#96
post #44
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bottlenecke…

That wasn't the GP's claim. Their implication was that it's an economic failure that we don't produce less powerful hardware.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#97
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.

> Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware The PineBuds are designed and sold as an open firmware platform to allow software experimentation, so there’s nothing bad nor any economic failures going on here. Having a powerful general purpose microcontroller to experiment with is a design goal of the product. That said, ANC Bluetooth earbuds are not menial products. Doing…

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Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#98
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 will never understand people who treat MHz like a rationed resource.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware The PineBuds are designed and sold as an open firmware platform to allow software experimentation, so there’s nothing bad nor any economic failures going on here. Having a powerful general purpose microcontroller to experiment with is a design goal of the product. That said, ANC Bluetooth earbuds are not menial products. Doing…

[flagged]

These accusations of someone using ChatGPT are cheap mindless attacks based on nothing more than the fact that someone has put together a good argument and used good formatting.

If that's all your evidence is, don't you dare go near any scientific papers.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#100
post #94
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the "little part" of what fits into an earpiece. Each of those cores is maybe 0.04 square millimeters of die on e.g. 28nm process. RAM takes some area, but that's dwarfed by the analog and power components and packaging. The marginal cost of the gates making up the processors is effectively zero.

so 1mm2 peppered by those cores at 300MHz will give you 4 Tflops. And whole 200mm wafer - 100 Petaflops, like 10 B200s, and just at less than $3K/wafer. Giving half area to memory we'll get 50 PFlops with 300Gb RAM. Power draw is like 10-20KW. So, giving these numbers i'd guess Cerebras has tremendous margin and is just printing money :)

Yes, assuming you don't need to connect anything together and that RAM is tinier than it really is, sure. At 28nm, 3megabits/square millimeter is what you get of SRAM, so an entire wafer only gets you ~12 gigabytes of memory.

And, of course, most of Cerebras' costs are NRE and the stuff like getting heat out of that wafer and power in.

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