The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

The world DOES run on older hardware.

How new do you think the CPU in your bank ATM or car's ECU is?

Related: I wonder what cpu Artemis/Orion is using

Well I know the CPU in my laptop is already over 10 years old and still works good enough for everything I do.

IBM PowerPC 750X apparently, which was the CPU the Power Mac G3 used back in the day. Since it's going into space it'll be one of the fancy radiation-hardened versions which probably still costs more than your car though, and they run four of them in lockstep to guard against errors.

https://www.eetimes.com/comparing-tech-used-for-apollo-artem...

Some of it does.

The chips in everyones pockets do a lot of compute and are relatively new though.

Sure, if you think the world consists of cash transactions and whatever a car needs to think about.

I'm not sure what artemis or orion are, but you can blame defense contractors for this. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM or Lockheed, even if they deliver unimpressive results at massive cost.

Doom can run on Apple's Lightning to HDMI adapter.

If we're talking numbers, there are many, many more embedded systems than general purpose computers. And these are mostly built on ancient process nodes compared to the cutting edge we have today; the shiny octa-cores on our phones are supported by a myriad of ancilliary chips that are definitely not cutting edge.

We aren't talking numbers, though. Who cares about embedded? I mean that literally. This is computation invisible by design. If that were sufficient we wouldn't have smartphones.

Powerplants and planes still run on 80s hardware.

My daily drivers at home are an i3-540 and and Athlon II X4. Every time something breaks down, I find it much cheaper to just buy a new part than to buy a whole new kit with motherboard/CPU/RAM.

I'm a sysadmin, so I only really need to log into other computers, but I can watch videos, browse the web, and do some programming on them just fine. Best ROI ever.

Put a 4 nm CPU into something that goes to space and see how long it would take to fail.

One of the tradeoffs of radiation hardening is increased transistor size.

Cost-wise it also makes sense - it’s a specialized, certified and low-volume part.

I don't disagree that the engineering can be justified. But you don't need custom hardware to achieve radiation hardening, much less hiring fucking IBM.

And to be clear, I love power chips. I remain very bullish about the architecture. But as a taxpayer reading this shit just pisses me off. Pork-fat designed to look pro-humanity.

> I can watch videos

Can you watch H.265 videos? That's the one limitation I regularly hit on my computer (that I got for free from some company, is pretty old, but is otherwise good enough that I don't think I'll replace it until it breaks). I don't think I can play videos recorded on modern iPhones.

Yes, they play just fine with Gnome Videos or VLC. Both machines have a GeForce GT 710 on them.

> fancy radiation-hardened versions

Ha! What's special about rad-hard chips is that they're old designs. You need big geometries to survive cosmic rays, and new chips all have tiny geometries.

So there are two solutions:

1. Find a warehouse full of 20-year old chips.

2. Build a fab to produce 20-year old designs.

Both approaches are used, and both approaches are expensive. (Approach 1 is expensive because as you eventually run out of chips they become very, very valuable and you end up having to build a fab anyway.)

There's more to it than just big geometries but that's a major part of the solution.

Modern planes do not, and many older planes have been retrofitted, in whole or in part, with more modern computers.

Some of the specific embedded systems (like the sensors that feed back into the main avionics systems) may still be using older CPUs if you squint, but it's more likely a modern version of those older designs.

> But you don't need custom hardware to achieve radiation hardening

Citation needed

> much less hiring fucking IBM

It's an IBM designed processor, what are you talking about?!

In a way, and for a long time, smartphones were/are defined as embedded devices.

I still don't see how one can classify a smartphone as a general-purpose computing device, even though they have enough computing power as a laptop.

A USB charger is more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer: https://web.archive.org/web/20240101203337/https://forresthe...

There's a decent chance something in the room you're in right now is running an 8051 core.

I'd be willing to bet that even a brand new iPhone has a surprising number of reasonably old pieces of hardware for Bluetooth, wifi, gyroscope, accelerometer, etc. Not everything in your phone changes as fast as the CPU.