The future: we have replaced the microplastic in our blood with microcontrollers
And each of them is powerful enough to run Doom
You had me at “run Doom”.
So right at the end?
So you are saying once it gets into your bloodstream you are doomed?
in every meaning of the word
I live in Denmark, work in a location with about 120 people. Two of them believe this, and there is a third one who’s a massive Trump fan. I try to not interact with them.
I’m sure they have interesting things to say about the covid vaccines.
about
the covidvaccines.There, all fixed now.
It’s spreading around Scandinavia like wildfire, no idea why, but lot of people are scared of this happening.
And the microcontrollers to control the microplastics.
And the microcontrollers will be charged by mitochondria.
The powerhouse of the cell??
Would you like gray goo with that?
Yes please. Can’t be much worse than what we have now.
At what point do we become Borg
Mitochondria, the PowerPChouse of the cell.
32-bit processor, the powerhouse of the cell
and it has started already! didn’t you hear about the covid vaccine!!!
You guys are so out of the loop! RFK Jr has known about this and has been speaking about it since at least 2001 when he had that brain worm removed.
In broad terms, that seems to put it about on par with an Intel 386 chip from 1985
At 24 MHz, it’s actually about 4-6 times faster than a full fledged 33 MHz i80386DX with 10 times as many transistors back in the day.
It’s absolutely insane that i386 remained the standard with its inferior high latency design.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
exhibiting BASIC language performance ten times faster than a newly introduced 80386-based computer
That was an 8MHz Arm system, and it was commonly recognized as being clearly faster than a 33MHz i80386DX!
In fact the 8036 was so inefficient at 33MHz it couldn’t even beat the speed of a 16 MHz 80286 on 16 bit code!!
Mips, Alpha, Motorola, Sparc and finally Arm were all better, but they weren’t backed by IBM, and the availability of clones made the PC relatively cheap. But basically everything else was better than Intel.Unfortunately Arm also lacked a math co-processor, so for tasks that were heavy on FP calculations, an i386 with co-processor was superior.
Also Arm was unable to sell them cheap enough to capture at least a niche market. (Apart from education in UK)
And for the hobbyist an Amiga was way cheaper, and had powerful graphics and sound chips.Now you got me remembering my 2MHz “big board” Z80 computer I put together in the 80s from a kit. First computer I ever owned. On first power-up nothing seemed to happen, then I turned up the monitor brightness and a choir of angels sang.
I love this.
Thank you. This kind of information was exactly what I wanted in the comments.
As a person who started on a 286 this seems blazing fast. Just wish it had ports for power, HDMI and USB
HDMI
I don’t believe it has enough RAM for any real video, among other things.
“It does in fact run Doom”, he said before he snorted a line of his new favorite drug - a dark grey line of Megaflops.
Wear your N95 around the next gen SoCs. We don’t know the effects of inhaling them (yet)
We don’t know the effects of inhaling them (yet)
This is making the Republicans so nervous.
Not in the forehead! Not in the forehead!
What would you be referring to?
Like a solid half of all antivaxxers are anti vax because they’re convinced that Bill Gates is putting microchips in your bloodstream to control your brain waves.
Now I miss thingsforants
Nanobots of 90’s sci-fi, here we finally come!
I want those fuckers powering little submarines that fight cancer cells right now - but realistically speaking, these microcontrollers would need to be at least one order two order of magnitude smaller for that, no?
Just reprogram viruses (like the microbe) instead. It’s easier.
Oh, absolutely. I just mean that we appear to be headed in that direction.
I can guarantee you they wouldn’t (solely) be used for pur benefit
32-bit just won’t die!
I was just thinking that. XD
Just nuts that my 386 was to big to take on my pushy as a kid and now the same thing would get lost in my nose hairs
Maybe you just didn’t have long enough nose hair as a kid
Package options : 20-pin, 16-pin or 8-pin … but looking at Texas instrument website i did not find the pinout …
You found it 👍 This large document include pinout for the 20 pins package and it is somewhat complicated since each pin may have many uses … it would be hard to imagine (for me) what would the 8 pins package pinout would look like !
I couldn’t find the actual pinout for the 8 pin package, but the block diagrams make me think they’re power, ground, and 6 general purpose pins which can all be GPIO. Other functions, like ADC, SPI and I2C (all of which it has) will be secondary or tertiary functions on those same pins, selected in software.
So the actual answer you’re looking for is basically that all of the pins are everything, and the pinout is almost entirely software defined
Looks like a micro Lego. Hell, it is a micro Lego.
How would you ever actually practically use this
Same way you would in any other microcontroller application, but smaller, so the whole device can be smaller.
Get small enough and we can really have those bloodstream robots.
Maybe an actual useful smart ring?
In small things. Probably not very feasible for hobby projects unless you can get it soldered on when the PCB is built.
BGA, like in the photo, isn’t the only option. There are options only slightly larger with hand-solderable packages (if you’re good at soldering)
This is already technically hand solderable with the right equipment.
In any use where size and or weight is important. For example wearables and flying drones
I make specialty vehicle electronics. My immediate thought was very small and cheap sensors. Similar to tire pressure monitoring but wired with CAN or something similar.
fly-sized spy drone
You could use it as the logic board for a micro drone, something the size of a dime perhaps. Or other applications where weight or space are extremely limited. Another example might be a medical implant of some sort, this is small enough that it could be a part of a device that is meant to be placed inside an artery, or an eyeball, or an ear canal.
Wrist watch.
see comment from @Lumberjacked (it is complicated !)
This article was written by someone who only knows buzz words. They said it’s “not just the silicon(edited from silicone), but the entire microcontroller” what do they think processors have other than silicone?
Edit: silicone->silicon
They’re referencing the package as a whole, plastic casing, gold internal wiring, etc. and the silicon die in the center of it all.
This still makes no sense, because the gold wiring is a huge cost. Why dafuq wouldn’t current manufacturing encourage smaller packages? And there has been a push to make things thinner since ad memorium, so why wouldn’t they have made the die slimmer?
Edit: good to know the hive mind still exists.
Work on this stuff:
Thermal reasons, having enough pins and routabke pads on the board so you can land them from the package, mechanical properties (strong enough not to get squished).
We do what we do because it’s the cheapest way that covers the requirements and is still easy to assemble.
We slowly move to smaller pitches, but they’re more expensive to deal with, you need more accuracy on your pick and place and the tolerances on your pads and soldermask are smaller.
You’re asking why they didn’t make the package thinner than like .1mm thick…?
Or are you commenting on some sense of surprise that someone would want to make small things, or something? If so, not sure what you’re referring to.
I’m saying there is no reason to say this microcontroller is vastly different from current products on the market.
Sure there is.
As far as I know this is the smallest full microcontroller package on the market. Which is what makes it interesting and why we are here talking about it.
Are there others?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but there is no silicone at all in microprocessors but silicon.
You’re right, I don’t type that word into my phone much so the autocorrect effed me. I’ll edit for clarity.
You forgot to edit the second silicone at the end of your sentence.
I thought this headline was a Clinton joke.
