On the flip side, the fact that those processors were enough to steer spacecraft make me feel like there’s also a decent amount of remarkable wtf in how much compute we have now and how little we get out of each instruction on average compared to what people were doing with these z80 equivalents.

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dreamcompiler an hour ago | parent | next [-]

When you don't have the overhead of an operating system with decades of backward compatibility cruft, a scheduler, a virtual memory controller, and a file system you can accomplish amazing things with simple processors. Bare metal is something I'd encourage every programmer to try.

	▲	dahart an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah exactly, we now have so many layers of stuff. On top of vmem & OS, add high def displays, and today’s corporate firewall and malware scanning. I wouldn’t be surprised if just booting my Win 11 laptop, logging in, and launching Teams uses more compute than the entire Galileo mission used over its entire 8 year run. :P Even without the layers & cruft though, the raw perf is astounding to those of us who remember 8 bit 1Mhz microprocessors. Today’s gamers are used to double-digit teraflops(!) of compute, just to render all the pixels for Minecraft or Fortnite. I don’t know if there’s a better way these days, but for me Arduino has been an easy & super fun way to futz with a tiny bare metal microprocessor.

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redsocksfan45 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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