Amazon's $1,600 Astro robot has FOUR CPUs running Linux? | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's $1,600 Astro robot has FOUR CPUs running Linux?

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21 pointsluu14 comments

I don’t get it, is it that ridiculous? Having four different SoCs for different functions seems reasonable? Especially the mediatek one is the same one as their echo tablets. Makes a ton sense since it probably runs the same core software as the echo line.

>Having four different SoCs for different functions seems reasonable?

Not having different physical machines for different functions is sort of the entire reason computers exist. Having 30 CPUs to drive a robot through a parking lot when we landed on the moon with like five IBM System/4 Pis, yes that is ridiculous. That Astro robot should have used hardware that costs 200 bucks

Your usb-c to HDMI dongle has more processing power than the computer we used to get to the moon, at a millionth the size. Computing power used to get to moon is maybe not a useful unit of computing to compare things to. If you think you could make the same robot but with a BOM of $200, and severely undercut Amazon, you could do a Kickstarter and make a bunch of money.

Boy do I have some surprise for you about a modern car…An older modern car has about 4 ECUs. Usually with multiple SoCs in each ECU either for FuSa reasons or performance reasons. Comparing a modern consumer product with the Apollo 11 machine is illogical. The Apollo compute system had a ton of custom analog circuits (understandably so). Loading hacker news which is predominantly text based requires more memory than what they had in the main compute module (4 kB).

> we landed on the moon with like five IBM System/4 Pis,

...and the largest rocket ever built. Once you have that, the computer is really a sideshow, as opposed to a robot that is mostly a thin veneer around the computer.

The link redirects to https://notnow.dev/notice/AllhmPK9G8kaPxCbPk.

I think people are surprised at how many chips are in a car — basically every option has its own chip. If you don’t order the car with that option, then you don’t get the chip.

Tesla did something that would seem normal to most non-automotive engineers—they just made one chip to run all the functions (not exactly accurate, but close enough for this discussion). But that is heretical to how automotive came to be.

Power windows would include what they needed in the feature. You don’t put a big cpu in the car just in case someone ordered power windows. Same with door locks. And each electrical thing that got tacked on over the years/decades.

Cars should have bitten the bullet much earlier in consolidation. Still not there yet for most.

A huge save Tesla's architecture can have is in cables. It seems silly, but that amount of automotive-grade cables sums up to the cost of the different electronic units.

Doesn't surprise me at all they didn't implemented that before Tesla knowing how problematic are electronic and software in plenty of ICE cars.

No doubt there will be some remarkable home robots coming out but I’d find it hard to trust them.

Probably it's an off-P&L project of a bunch of unsupervised engineers tucked in a nondescript building in Sunnyvale which is losing money per unit (without even factoring in R&D costs) with no real way to profitability, or else they'd already DfM (Design for Manufacturing) it to death thus taking away any repairability.

Replacing 1 chip with a lead time of 2 years with 4 chips you can buy today and some software sounds like DfM to me.

Probably, but I’m guessing Shenzhen rather than Sunnyvale.

Yep, they are probably selling these pretty close to the BOM cost without any real hope to amortize the R&D unless they were planning on selling a million of these.

Great, now my, already distracting, tablet can literally hurt me down. Why does this thing exist?

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