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Search - "transistors"
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Yet another rant about crappy electronic designs.
Just now I was cleaning my desk and stumbled upon some old hard drive in a caddy that I still had laying around.. I figured, let's plug it in and see whether the drive still works. And to some extent, it does! Except that every few minutes it craps out on me. And after disassembling the caddy, I think that I know why.
Just as background information, hard drives work at 12V and generally require about 10W to spin their motor. Meanwhile USB operates at 5V. So a boost converter needs to be present in the controller to step up the voltage and power the drive.
Now what's a boost converter? It's an inductor, a capacitor, a transistor and a diode in a specific arrangement (if you're interested in the design, check out https://youtube.com/watch/...), along with feedback circuitry to stabilize output voltage. Now that transistor is important.. it switches at very high frequency, and its rise and fall times create heat. In the particular transistor used in that controller, it apparently causes the transistor to operate at 65-68°C. That's quite toasty IMO, and overheating may be why the controller is so unstable. But the Chinese manufacturers thought that it's just fine and okay to be sold without heatsink or some research into transistors with better rise and fall times.
So the hard drive craps out on me and yet again it's because of certified shitdesigns. MOTHERFUCKTURERS!!!!27 -
NVIDIA have just announced Titan V, with 12GB and 21 billion transistors.
But can it run Minecraft with shaders though?5 -
RANT TIME!
Sorry guys, I know this is devRant and probably not a place to post this but am fucking burning with fury and fatigue! I should probably develop elecRant and post it there instead.
I FUCKING HATE POWER ELECTRONICS!!
I am in my final year of electrical engineering and I can fucking say with confidence that power electronics is the most fucked up unit I have seen in my life. A whole load of useless math from simple RLC circuits just to make students' lives miserable. For those who might not know, power electronics is some unit that involves use of solid state electronics(transistors, diodes etc) for power applications(switching mostly). Basically things like inverters and converters. UPS systems are an example of their applications.
Now don't be fooled by how that sounds cool and so smart, this shit is fucked up. These circuits in the attached picture might just seem like simple RLC networks with some BJTs, but they are devils in their own right. They fucking need some advanced unnecessary calculus and Fourier analysis to even calculate the simplest output current!! Worst still, some of these motherfuckers have more than 1 mode of operation,needing one to analyze some fucking 100+ waveforms. I fucking hate this shiit! I hate it!
You might say that i am just being lazy and don't want to study. Let me tell you something, FUCK YOU TOO!!19 -
I found something even more effective than coffee on hard Mondays mornings. A fresh cup of technology, just the right quantity of silicium, transistors and sensors with a pinch of cloud connectivity.9
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Transistor sizes are getting smaller and smaller by the day, though we cannot go below the size of a virus due to compartment limitation but the tiniest is smaller than a DNA.
Having chips designed at such a tiny scale looks more scary to me than amazing. Imagine my manager screaming at me, I can give him a slap on the face and infect him with 1 million A8 chips. Now that would be amazing because I just successfully turned him into an iPhone 6.
Me: Hey Siri, what's the weather now?
Manager: 32 degree Fahrenheit, high wind, low humidity.
Me: Yeah that's what's up, you won't be needing an upgrade anytime soon.10 -
The IT guy my parents had often at their home.
This guy thought me how to manage our network, how to create mobile apps. How to debug problems and so on. He sparked so much interest for computers in me and now i can't stop fiddleing around with computers.
Also this "electrician" who worked for my parents.
Basically he fixxed old keyboards, loudspeakers and stuff like that. He thought me about resistors, transistors, blue prints and how to solder stuff.
"Lötzinn blödsinn"
They both started my journey into the rabbit hole of technology.1 -
If we made computers out of Fry's transistors, it would cost a couple billion dollars. These better be insanely deluxe.1
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I have a 16 year old son who is off-and-on showing interest in learning electronics. He wants to work for NASA someday. I’ve looked at dozens of Arduino and Raspberry Pi kits but I feel like he would benefit not so much from “mostly done for him” types of kits that are more like toys, but the kind that teach more fundamentals like resistors, capacitors, transistors, relays, etc. In other words, knowing first what the principles are behind the fancier kits. Do any of you have a recommendation of kits that start with the fundamentals, but that can still be inspiring and engaging?11
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The Moto MC68000 CPU in the original Mac had 68k transistors. Apple sold 372k units in 1984. 68k x 372k=25.3bn
The A12X SoC in an iPad Pro has 10bn transistors.
So, if you’re inclined to really unfair comparisons:
3 iPads => all Macs sold in the first year
Found via https://twitter.com/benedictevans/... -
Wait, so pressing a key on a modern system and it showing up on screen is slower than it was back in the 70s and 80s because the ratio of transistors to clock speed is worse?
https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency... -
I read the other day that tech companies are trying and failing to make chips smaller and faster by reducing transistor size.
Yet Apple does this with ease. You know how?
They remove or REDUCE the number of transistors to make it smaller.2 -
It's 2022 and people still believe USB sticks and external card readers are a replacement for memory card slots.
They're not. SD cards have a standardized form factor and do not protrude from memory card slots, but external card readers and USB sticks do.
Just like smartphones, laptops are increasingly ditching the SD card slot or replacing it with microSD, which has less capacity, lower life expectancy and data retention span due to smaller memory transistors, worse handling, and no write-protection switch.
Not only should full-sized SD cards be brought back to laptops, but also brought to smartphones. There might soon be 2 TB SD cards, meaning not one second of worrying about running out of space for years. That would be wonderful.22 -
If transistors switched as fast as your ex left you, we’d become a galactic civilization even without P = NP.2
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Half of the courses we had in our college were about electronics. Except Microprocessors and Transistors, it's not relevant.
We even had chemistry and engineering drawing. So we essentially wasted more than half of our time.
Besides languages, weren't taught anything about real world software development.
Nothing about how to work with an existing code base, version control, design patterns, system design, creating a website, debugging, functional programming, scalability, reliability.
The industry should be involved in setting the syllabus and also contributing part time teachers.3 -
Apple A12:
• 7nm
• 6.9B transistors
• 6 CPU cores
• 4 GPU cores
• 8 “neural” cores
• 5 trillion ops/sec
• 512GB addressable storage
• Oh and the rest of the “stuff” for a SoC
tl;dr Apple is the leading chip innovator and creator in the world.
Don't @ me4