flâneur

Apollo 11 vs USB-C Chargers

forrestheller.com · 1,906 words · saved by 1 readers

I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969. The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer has a master clock frequency of 1.024MHz. Instructions need at least 12 clock cycles (11.72uS). It operates using one's complement integer arithmetic. There is no floating point. There is a single accumulator register to perform arithmetic. The Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 uses a CYPD4225, containing an ARM Cortex-M0 CPU. Luckily for this analysis both the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer and the Cortex-M0 CPUs are very predictable compared to more sophisticated modern CPUs. They have no cache and memory access happens at a constant speed. Instructions execute in-order. They have no hardware floating point. They have no vector/matrix hardware (like AVX, SSE, or NEON). Therefore we can learn a lot by jus

Apollo 11 vs USB-C Chargers Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) vs USB-C Chargers I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969. Device Google Pixel 18W Charger Huawei 40W SuperCharge Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 Apollo 11 Moon Landing Guidance Computer (AGC) Function Charges a phone Charges a phone or maybe a laptop Charges 2 phones or maybe laptops Fly most-of-the-way to moon ( CSM )

related reading