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by jmyeet 24 days ago
I don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind of) 32 bit CPU (that does have an FPU) is about as close as you can find to this (which has no FPU but it does have USB2.0 and 2.4GHz wireless, which is well beyond what Intel CPUs could do at the time).

And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later.

A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU.

I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time.

[1]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-c...
1 comments
fragmede 24 days ago
That we can fit a more computing power in an adapter cable than it took to take us to the moon is what gets me.
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jmyeet 24 days ago
I would say it's funny but really it's just true. Thunderbolt cables and a lot of other high bandwidth cables have chips in either end, which some people don't realize. And yes, these chips have to handle IO in the gigabit range. So these microcontrollers are a bit apples to oranges (just like my WCH570 vs 486 comparison, to be clear) but even with all those caveats, yes it's basically true.

And yeah, that's wild.

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____tom____ 24 days ago
Not an area I'm familiar with, but do the chips really handle up in the gigabit IO? I thought they just handle connection setup. I had thought the gigabytes were not processed at all by the chips. They just flow through the wires.

?

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dcrazy 24 days ago
The chips in an active TB cable perform signal retiming. https://plugable.com/blogs/news/what-s-the-difference-betwee...
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____tom____ 24 days ago
That's cool. Thanks for the info
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fragmede 24 days ago
"Cable" is loosely defined, but a cable with usb-c on one end and anything else (eg HDMI) on the other has to do some processing of the signal in order to do that.
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