A lot of people are walking around with more computing power than they need, no question about it. A lot of that, though, is just salesmanship. I know a fairly well to do guy who bought himself a Microsoft Surface Book. And, you know, he's not very tech saavy so he just went to the store, told the salesman for what he needs a computer and the salesman sold him a Surface Book.CwF wrote: 2023-09-22 17:41 People walk around with enough phone compute to manage a lunar mission...
Really, insofar as the Surface line is concerned, he'd have been better off with the cheaper Surface Laptop, or really an even cheaper Asus or Lenovo. He's a marriage therapist and really only uses his computer to take notes and probably order the occaisional pleasantry from Amazon or Walmart. He doesn't play games, he doesn't do any 3D visualization or arcitectural rendering. The NVidia dGPU in his Surface Book is just sitting there sucking down watt after watt at idle, I doubt it ever even kicks in over the iGPU. But, like so many people in his financial bracket, he trusted the salesman to lead him in the right direction.
That's why they have more informed people making decisions in places like NASA. NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars, for example, is powered by a 233Mhz PowerPC 750 CPU. The same single core chip that powered Apple's iMac G3 in 1998. Of course NASA's technicians weren't looking to run physics simulations on Mars, their highest priority was reliability. And, apparently, the PowerPC 750 has a proven track record.
