Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

This gets said all the time, but what do people expect? Chips that can run doom are basically the bottom tier chip now. There is no point making lower power chips because they would use the same physical resources to produce.

Do you find it odd that most people buy chairs capable of supporting 200kg when they know that no one over 100kg will ever sit on it?

View on HN

That is not really accurate. There are plenty of chips being made that are less powerful. Such as the Epson S1C60 which is a 4-bit MCU capable of running at a whopping 1MHz frequency

Is it materially cheaper? Pennies per device isn’t going to be particularly compelling in this application, if it even is cheaper to begin with.

Also at too low power, it might not be able to perform the “smart” aspects of the light

Chairs are given large safety margins, and designed to accommodate a wide range of people. Chips also have safety margins, but chips are not chairs, and there are other forces causing overpowered ARMs to be put into simple electronics, namely prevalence and mass production bringing the price down to pennies, so much so that it costs far less to develop some high level code for an cheap overpowered ARM chip than develop some more specialised embedded code for more "appropriately" sized microcontroller for the job. Sometimes things will still sway back to the specialised chips when things like power constraints or more specific hardware features carry enough weight for the purpose.

>Do you find it odd that most people buy chairs capable of supporting 200kg when they know that no one over 100kg will ever sit on it?

I guess you never had sex on a chair.

or partner/kids sitting on top of you

The latter is overengineering for safety, using a fast chip isn't. But I imagine it's the cheapest, small SoC that offers bluetooth or wifi, or whatever a "smart" lamp needs. If someone wants to rail against the need for smart lamps, however, they'd have a point.

Ikea uses zigbee. Better for this purpose than wifi or BT (but sadly not much).

A Cortex-M33 microcontroller costs like a coffee, and much less that that for Ikea that can then sell more lamps and at a higher margin, because people like introducing more complications in their lives, like software updates for what used to be a wire and a switch.

> Do you find it odd that most people buy chairs capable of supporting 200kg when they know that no one over 100kg will ever sit on it?

it solved through more materials or technologies per $ input. Chairs that can support more mass require non-trivial production and/or rare materials. You likely can produce a chair out of titanium or carbon fabric that could support more weight. There're no chairs that are both cheap and can support variety of use cases.

Perhaps the cost of programming the smaller chips is high enough to offset it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com