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IBM PC for $4,000ish: Intel 8088 @ 4.77 MHz with 256 KB of motherboard memory on some models

Raspberry Pi Pico W for $5ish: two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores @ 133MHz with 264kB of on-chip SRAM

Nearly 25 times the computing power (per core! So really 50 something times the computing power total) for 800 times less the price.

Absolutely staggering how much our computing hardware capabilities have progressed!

(And how we waste said hardware with our bloated proglangs. Anyone have book recommendations for RTL design patterns, design thinking?)



I mean, if you're just looking at compute-per-dollar then this is a rather bland entry. The Pi Zero came out in 2015 for $5 and has >1000x the memory, is much faster and is a real computer that runs linux and even multiplies floats. Even among MCUs this one is not that great, you can find STM32-based boards ("blue/black pill") for <$3.


Also the venerable ESP8266 packaged as ESP12f at about $3 in hobby quantities. Sure, it is slow, but includes wifi.


How do the stm mcus compare to the teensy? I think the latest teensy is much faster than prevision versions, hitting 600mhz.


The Teensy 4.x are based on a Cortex-M7 chip[1] from NXP. The STM32H7 line is also based on a Cortex-M7, though officially only up to 550MHz.

I haven't studied the capabilities much, the biggest difference I could see was that the 550MHz version of the H7 only comes with 0.5MB SRAM vs 1MB SRAM for NXP one, while the H7 with 1MB SRAM only goes to 480MHz. However the STM32 parts comes with flash memory included (up to 2MB), while the NXP one has none. To me it seems the STM32H730VB[2] is one of the closer matches if you favor speed, while the STM32750VB[3] if you favor SRAM, but it depends heavily on the metric used for comparison.

[1]: https://www.nxp.com/part/MIMXRT1062DVL6A#/

[2]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...

[3]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...


> The STM32H7 line is also based on a Cortex-M7, though officially only up to 550MHz.

Unofficially, CPU cores on the STM32H7 parts I've worked with are often stable well into the 700+ MHz range. Peripherals are another story.


Yes, teensy 4.x is much faster, probably about 10x, but is also ~10x more expensive.


>And how we waste said hardware with our bloated proglangs.

In fairness, the BASIC interpreter on the IBM PC was no paragon of efficiency either. And Microsoft's C compiler was something like $600. (In 1981 money when I was earning around $27K as an engineer.)




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