GreyEyedGhost

What you’re saying is mostly right, and in a practical sense is right, as well, but not as much from a technical sense. This is the specific block that is problematic.

Risc CPUs like the arm in the raspberry pi are really good at not doing anything, or doing a really small subset of things (it’s in the name!), but x86 is great at doing some stuff and being able to do a wide variety of stuff with its big instruction set. If you raise an eyebrow at my claim, consider that before gpus were the main way to do math in a data center it was x86. If the people who literally count every fraction of a watt of power consumption as billable time think it’s most efficient it probably is!

This is generally correct, per cycle. Overall, it really depends. The problem is, the x86 architecture does okay as long as it’s kept busy and the work to be performed is predictable (for the purposes of look-ahead and parallelization). This is why it’s great for those mathematical calculations you referred to, and why GPUs took over - they’re massively better performers on tasks that can be parallelized such as math calculations and graphics rendering. Beyond that, the ARM use case has been tuned to low power environments, which means the computing does poorly in environments that need a lot of calculations because, in general, more computing requires more power (or the same power with more efficient hardware, and now we’re talking about generational chip design differences). Now, couple that with the massive amount of money spent to make x86 what it is, and the relatively lower amounts that RISC and ARM received, and the gap gets wider.

Now, as I started with, even a basic x86 computer running at mostly idle is going to have pretty low power consumption, dollar-wise. Compare that to the power draw on a new router, or even a newer low-power mini PC, and your ROI is not going to indicate the need for that purchase if you have the hardware just sitting around idle. And it will still perform better than a raspberry pi configured to act as a router if your bandwidth is above about 250 mbps, if I remember correctly (and something like 120 mbps for the v4 and earlier generations).

There was a story about a researcher using evolving algorithms to build more efficient systems on FPGAs. One of the weird shortcuts was some system that normally used a clock circuit, but none was available, and it made a dead-end circuit the would give a electric pulse when used, giving it a makeshift clock circuit. The big problem was that better efficiency often used quirks of the specific board, and his next step was to start testing the results on multiple FPGAs and using the overall fitness to get past that quirk/shortcut.

Pretty sure this was before 2010. Found a possible link from 2001.

Summarize that sentence into a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji.

A single point of data rarely answers the question unless you’re looking for absolutes. “Will zipping 10 files individually be smaller than zipping them into a single file?” Sure, easy enough to do it once. Now, what kind of data are we talking about? How big, and how random, is the data in those files? Does it get better with more files, or is the a sweet spot where it’s better, but it’s worse if you use too few files, or too many? I don’t think you could test for those scenarios very quickly, and they all fall under the original question. OTOH, someone who has studied the subject could probably give you an answer easily enough in just a few minutes. Or he could have tried a web search and find the answer, which pretty much comes down to, “It depends which compression system you use.”

Pretty much everything you said is incorrect, except for the article age. Valetudo literally wrote software that does this on multiple models locally, including mapping. The response of the manufacturers whose models were capable of this was to release new versions where this wasn’t an option. As for servers and local control, there are a number of solutions for those with the knowledge and hardware to set it up, and the only thing stopping robovac companies from supporting this is (less) money.

We could still live in caves, but most of us have chosen not to. I’m personally of the opinion that every advancement that gives you more time to do things that are important to you are worth it. This doesn’t mean inviting every piece of spyware some company tries to thrust upon me is acceptable, either.

The Pebble Time 2 has a heart rate monitor. I can’t say if the rest of your statement is correct or not.