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
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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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?
Oh, absolutely. I just mean that we appear to be headed in that direction.
Just reprogram viruses (like the microbe) instead. It's easier.
"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)
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?
Mitochondria, the PowerPChouse of the cell.
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 covid~~ vaccines.
There, all fixed now.
At what point do we become Borg
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.
and it has started already! didn't you hear about the covid vaccine!!!
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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.
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
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.
This is making the Republicans so nervous.
What would you be referring to?
Not in the forehead! Not in the forehead!
Now I miss thingsforants
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
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.
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.
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.
Maybe an actual useful smart ring?
fly-sized spy drone
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
Wrist watch.
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