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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

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.

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These sorts of things feel like they would be quite inefficient on a general-purpose CPU so you would want to do them on some sort of dedicated DSP hardware instead. So I would expect an earbud to use some sort of specialized microcontroller with a slow-ish CPU core but extra peripherals to do all the signal processing and bluetooth-related stuff.

No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

FPGAs are not cost efficient at all for something like this.

MCUs are so cheap that you’d never get to a cheaper solution by building out a team to iterate on custom hardware until it was bug free and ready to scale. You’d basically be reinventing the MCU that can be bought for $0.10, but with tens of millions of dollars of engineering and without economies of scale that the MCU companies have.

> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply

Where are you imagining costy savings coming from? Custom anything is almost always vastly more expensive than using a standardised product.

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