Hacker News Reader

Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

> The chip in question, the Allwinner A13, is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. While it’s not much

When did 1 GHz cores become "not much" for small embedded systems?

It barely even manages to run node.js in a docker! /s

My guess would be that a lot of of embedded things like kitchen appliances tend to run touchscreens with graphical interfaces these days.

You can run a small touchscreen with an Arduino. You also don’t need a fast processor for a big touchscreen; just enough RAM and a dedicated video chip

Displays with relatively simple off-board processing are common, too; you can often run a big display pretty reasonably with a 16MHz Arduino: buydisplay.com

Yeah, and that's how you get laggy user interfaces that at least I despise. Spend that 4€ on a better chip.

How did we manage non-laggy user interfaces back in 1995 when 120 MHz single core/single chip, registers slower than modern RAM, and no dedicated graphics processor was top of the line?

By living without 20 layers of middleware.

With physical buttons instead of touch screens?

“Vive La Resolution!”

By writing lots of optimizations in hand optimized Assembly.

http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-zen-of-asm/

https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Assembly-Language-Systems-Pro...

And by using a highly restricted colour palette, low resolution, no anti-aliasing, etc.

It's scientifically proven that almost every post-2000 UI has slower response than a DOS input mask.

It appears for world-class 'small-screen' interface you need a couple of Linux-capable SoC chips and a decent FPGA https://xdevs.com/review/dmm6500/

The microarchitecture matters. Even ARM's out of order reference cores are very slow compared to intel CPUs. Now take an obsolete decade old core at mediocre 1 GHz and you suddenly have something that is cheap but also extremely slow compared to even a raspberry pi 3 which is also slow as hell.

so something it's very wrong, if a CPU at 20mhz can run softly a GUI at 800x600 and a CPU at 1ghz can't

A 1 ghz CPU absolutely can run a smooth touchscreen GUI, I think what OP meant is that it's not gonna be capable of running a snazzy Electron interface or some other trendy framework that makes everything super easy. You can't really afford the overhead that software running on a modern desktop can, so it will require a bit more work.

For reference, the original iPhone CPU was a single ARM11 core clocked at 412 MHz. Obviously it's possible, this Allwinner chip would run circles around that.

> snazzy Electron interface or some other trendy framework that makes everything super easy

Except that Electron is harder to use than pre-.NET Visual Basic, or Delphi, or especially HyperCard. All of the developer convenience of web apps, with all of the great performance of web apps!

I had smooth GUIs made with Visual Basic 3 running on my old 386@40

And my A1200 with a 68020@20 have a pretty smooth GUI

I think they are referring to the features of the SOC there. They follow it up with a mention that it doesn't have an HDMI controller on chip, I don't think it has an Ethernet controller either.

Really though, I don't think the SOC is that bare bones either.

Since quad-core Cortex-A53 chips kinda became the norm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com