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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

Is that processor more or less powerful than the processor in this laptop?

Funny question, but the answer is less powerful.

"This processor is a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller, roughly as powerful as the processor inside the original Macintosh."

"MSP430 is a 16 bit processor running at 16MHz. The Dhrystone benchmark measures 1.4 MIPS."[1]

No doom or rooting your MagSafe adapters.

[1]: http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr...

MSP430 are nice to play around with for hardware projects and they are very cheap, so you can quickly get to cheap products if you start your work with them instead of far more expensive processors.

Is an MSP430 really cheaper than a low end STM32?

I mean the MSP430 was great, 10 years ago, but the industry hasn't stood still.

True, good point. I just have many MSP430 boards lying around, so even blowing up and giving away a few 100 I would be fine hence I go for them when trying something out. I worked on a few projects with low powered bluetooth that had mandatory MSP430 usage so I again something I go for if I have to try something quickly and has the potential to turn into something I want to give away/sell.

Maybe not actual Doom, but that's fast enough to run some sort of FPS at least. Certainly fast enough to be a useful personal computer.

Maybe, it's been ported to commodore 64:

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=doom+on+commodore+64&safe...

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