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- Hacker News
- Does anyone know what would the price of this be, roughly of course, given that a customer ordered some thousands or tens of thousands?
I have no grasp of even the magnitude of the price for something like this.
by 7734128 - No more than 50 cents per CPU for this one.
Can get under 10 cents each for cheap minimalistic CPUs in high numbers.
by myrmidon - Price is listed on the site, the most expensive version is:
1-99 $0.720
100-249 $0.48925
0-999 $0.378
1,000+ $0.251
by zipy124 - The prices are right there if you click "ordering & quality". $0.19-0.23 depending on exact variant at quantities of 1000 and up. $0.6 for 1-99 although that will likely vary a lot if you are buying through a distributor instead of directly.by Karliss
- Can it run Prince of Persia?by nopurpose
- With a lot of code-golf, I would guess the answer is yes.
- Could you put a few thousand of these on a PCB and have a super duper tiny compute cluster?by LoganDark
- No.by goodpoint
- You mean ... Like a Beowulf cluster of those?by emil-lp
- Yes, but also why would you? at 24MHz, you would be better off paying 100x the price ($25) for a 2.4GHz chip (easily doable). Something like a Raspbery Pi Zero 2 W already comes pretty close to that and without the penalty of memory communication/bandwidth.by zipy124
- > Could you put a few thousand
If you had 1024 of these, you'd have a grand total of 1 MiB of RAM. You won't be compute clustering much with 1 MiB of RAM.
by topspin - I'm reminded of TIS-100, a game where you program a cluster of tiny, parallel CPUs using a custom assembly language. It's painful to get basic stuff done, but you can do some amazing things with some effort.by nneonneo
- https://hackaday.com/2025/07/07/160-core-risc-v-board-is-the...
I could only imagine the bringup fun for thousands of them. :P
by nullc - Yes, if you want all the drawbacks of distributed computing with none of the advantages: You'd probably be stuck with something UART based as interconnect, Every core is gonna have way too little RAM to do anything useful, you are missing like half the instruction set (floating point operations in software), and power draw at 4mW minimum per core adds up quickly to something that an efficient laptop-CPU would use.
On top of all this, latency for anything is gonna be abysmal because the cores are so slow...
I honestly don't see an application where this is even close to desirable.
Would be fun, tough, to have a 10-stack of PCBs with 10 by 10 CPUs each for a thousand cores (=> ~4W power @1.8V).
by myrmidon - It's a bit low on RAM, otherwise it's similar to a game boy advance. Maybe after the GBA, GBA SP, and GBA micro, it's time for a GBA.. nano?by ant6n
- Nintendo releasing a new GB would be wild and awesome. Unfortunately it'd likely be overpowered and emulate games they downloaded off ROM sites themselves.
They'd be done already if they bought up or licensed Analogue though.
by Cthulhu_ - A silly question (from a non-HW guy). Why are digital bathroom scales so coarse? Some have a weight resolution of +/- 500 grams. Would a better microcontroller make a weight faster or more presise? I guess this TI micro controller is overkill for a bathroom scale.by arnejenssen
- I've spent the last several years of building a very, very fancy scale (well, more of an industrial and R&D lab tool that can be used as a scale).
The reason is that most people use a dirt cheap HX711 or cheaper. A fancier microcontroller doesn't help all that much.
I got to 100dB of dynamic range at 1ksps (1 gram of noise at 100kg max load), so it's very much doable.
by Scene_Cast2 - It's down to the quality of the sensor, the quality of the ADC translating the signals from the sensor, and the implementation of the software that deals with the ADC translation.by yoggodoggo
- > this TI micro controller is overkill for a bathroom scale
For majority of use cases nowadays it's much easier to use a programmable chip than invent a complex device using discrete analog electronic parts.
- As others have said, the crap resolution is to mask the crap repeatability. Better processing can help, but good enough processing fits in the cheapest of microcontrollers. ADC quality is more important, signal conditioning and sensor quality more important still. The biggest factor for accuracy is likely calibration though. A sensor that's 2% accurate with a 2 point calibration can easily become a 0.25% sensor with a 5 point, 3 temperature calibration. But that all takes time, and unless you're running huge batches it adds too much to the bottom line of a low cost product. Source: Designed strain gauge sensors and manufacturing processes for a livingby Skwid
- I remember that a friend told that the Nintendo Wii Balance board gave her the weight on gram resolution. Which is 10-100x better than most commercial bathroom scales. But keep in mind that precision is not the same as accuracy.by arnejenssen
- Higher resolution would let the user see that your scale is zeroed badly, that repeatability sucks and that the measured weight is not even constant under a constant load.
Decreasing resolution hides all of those.
by myrmidon - Digital scales generally work by warping metal pieces and forcing a flex film resistor glued on the piece to be stretched along, causing its resistance to change, thereby breaking the balance of a Wheatstone bridge, creating force-proportional current to occur, which is finally read out with an ADC.
I guess the overall finickiness of that can't be instantly improved by a better microcontroller alone? They drift and have linearlity issues and show temperature dependancy and all that.
Precise body weight measurement at bathrooms is also probably not that important, 500 grams is one full bottle of soda/water; body weights can easily change that much within a single day.
I would suspect that the "real" reason is combination of both. 100-500g can be a "good" compromise for cheap bathroom scales.
by numpad0 - Computing power is crazy cheap and does not help. The perceived slowness is because the taken measurements are averaged over second or so. When you step on the scale your weight shifts around and that affects the measurement by far more than half a kg. Averaging gives you better accuracy and more confidence in the result but it doesn't improve the measurement precision.
The scale precision comes from calibration of the measuring mechanism done on factory line at certain weights. If your specific body weight is far from the weights used in calibration, or too much time passed, then the calibration doesn't help much.
A better microcontroller doesn't help at all. Even a cheapest uC from decades ago is good enough. Better ADC and gauge sensor would help, but even more important is good analog engineering to produce self-correcting circuits with decent noise rejection.
In general this category of products is more for tracking changes in your body weight than getting the precise absolute value. And the body weight changes a lot just from hydration level, so the ±.5kg tolerance is considered good enough.
by jmiskovic - This 32-bit microcontroller has 1 kB of RAM.
The Apple Disk II Controller discussed yesterday used two 256-byte ROM chips and a shift register for dynamic memory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102
The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one.
I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.
by watersb - One thing I find impressive is that this part has GPIOs equal to the total number of pins minus two. Economical is the word that comes to mind.by peteforde
- It seems awesome, but I'm having a problem with figuring out how can a "normal" person use it. How would YOU use it, reader of this comment?
- From the datasheet:
Applications
• Battery charging and management
• Power supplies and power delivery
• Personal electronics
• Building security and fire safety
• Connected peripherals and printers
• Grid infrastructure
• Smart metering
• Communication modules
• Medical and healthcare
• Lighting
by amelius - Anyone using these small chips for hobbyist purposes probably should look at the more fully featured MSPM0-L line or MSPM0-G lines. Still Cortex-M0+ and in the sub $2 market... But hobbyists probably don't see much cost benefit below that (how many MCUs are you buying anyway??).
The L line and G lines have better ADCs, Comparators, better connectivity, and some of them even have on board OpAmps.
Tiny chips have a use of you are tying to build the absolute smallest devices. But hobbyists don't have the equipment to comfortably build things of this size.
Sizing up to VQFN packages and 0603 passives makes more sense for the typical hobbyist.
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As far as how a professional would use this, there are plenty of good uses of chips inside of cables or other kinds of smarts. Like a chip controlling a bunch of LEDs for example, based on voltage measurements elsewhere (there is a 12-bit ADC after all, which means you have rather solid voltage sensing from a few pins).
Basic voltage comparisons + math + crude timer and then a few pins for in/out gets you to a lot of useful projects. Albeit dumb ones. I dunno why anything needs to be this small in particular though.
by dragontamer