> 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 ANC properly is very complicated. It’s much harder than taking the input from a microphone, inverting the signal, and feeding it into the output. There’s a lot of computation that needs to be done continuously.

Using a powerful microcontroller isn’t a failure, it’s a benefit of having advanced semiconductor processes. Basically anything small and power efficient on a modern process will have no problem running at tens of MHz speeds. You want modern processes for the battery efficiency and you get speed as a bonus.

The speed isn’t wasted, either. Higher clock speeds means lower latency. In a battery powered device having an MCU running at 48MHz may seem excessive until you realize that the faster it finishes every unit of work the sooner it can go to sleep. It’s not always about raw power.

Modern earbuds are complicated. Having a general purpose MCU to allow software updates is much better than trying to get the entire wireless stack, noise cancellation, and everything else completely perfect before spinning out a custom ASIC.

We’re very fortunate to have all of this at our disposal. The groveling about putting powerful microcontrollers into small things ignores the reality of how hard it is to make a bug-free custom ASIC and break even on it relative to spending $0.10 per unit on a proven microcontroller manufacturer at scale.

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.

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 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.

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 run a 33 year old game.. well, that's just technological progression.

A single modern smartphone has more compute than all global conpute of 1980 combined.

I think it's just indicative of the fact that general purpose hardware has more applications, and can thus be mass produced for cheaper at a greater scale and used for more applications.

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.

> 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.

Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity, whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more (free) compute.

It's also a triumph of the previous generation of programmers to be able to make interesting games that took so little compute.

If it can run Doom it can run malware.

Marginal cost of a small microprocessor in an ASIC is nothing.

The RAM costs a little bit, but if you want to firmware update in a friendly way, etc, you need some RAM to stage the updates.

It's intuitive to think of wasted compute capacity as correlating with a waste of material resources. Is this really the case though?

If you look at the bottom of the page, it’s an advertisement for someone looking for a job to show off his technical skill.

What compression ratio does your jpeg encoding achieve?

It's Doom in part because it's a significantly popular game, that was open sourced, with low resource requirements (but not too low to be trivial), with an innovative custom engine that people find interesting, originally created by a person who many respect or admired growing up, and the game itself is cool. And now there is enough inertia to keep choosing it.

Most people don't realize that games were small back then because they had to be.

The value of being small for most users almost doesn't exist. If you have bandwidth limits then yeah download size is important but most don't.

So the only meaningful change optimizations make is "will it run well enough" and "does it fit on my disk".

Put more plainly "if it works at all it doesn't matter" is how most consumers (probably correctly) treat performance optimizations/installation size.

The sacrifices you talk about were made at explicit request of consumers. Games have to be "long enough" and the difference between enough game loop and grinding is a taste thing. Games have to be "pretty" and for better or worse stylized takes effort and is a taste thing (see Wind Waker) while fancy high res lighting engines are generally recognized as good.

I will say though while being made by indies means they are optimized terribly the number of stylized short games is phenomenally high it can just be hard to find them.

Especially since it is difficult for an hour or two game to be as impactful as a similar length movie so they tend to not be brought up as frequently.

Im with you. I want to play Freespace 2 on earbuds.

Subreddit of Doom ports: https://www.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/

John is now on a mission to make AGI a reality. I’d say given his own investment there, he’s probably positive about it.

Just speculation on my part of course.

Also, “masters of doom” is such a good book. Recommend it for anyone who wants to peek behind the scenes of how Carmack, Romero, and iD software built Doom (and Wolf3D etc).

Carmak made extensive use of AI during Doom development: Approximate Interpolation.

The Puya PY32 series MCUs found in most vapes have 3kb of RAM and 24kb of ROM, whereas Doom requires at least 4MB of RAM. Assuming Moore's law also applies to the computing power inside a disposable vape, we should be seeing that post in around a decade :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVsvtEj9iqE

To be honest, I've never actually used them for their intended purpose. No idea what the comfort or audio quality is like. There's a Pinebuds channel on the Pine64 discord, you can ask questions there :)

Was using them just this morning. I've been using them since they are out. Great device but battery is quite limited, ~2hrs top with ANC on.

I'm also curious. I used to be a big supporter of Pine64 but the e-ink tablet and phone debacles have kinda soured me on them.

This was a stretch goal, multiplayer. One earbuds versus the other. It's not that hard to implement but I've got a few other things to clear away first.

Using them for distributed computation though? interesting use of free will xD

Disposable Vape CPU!

and risk having them interpret it as a declaration of war?