Essay 07 A 3G Computer Specification

Essay 07 A 3G Computer Specification

Minimum Specification Computer

It was sometime ago when Raspberry Pi Foundation came up with Raspberry Pi Zero. That's a bubble gum size computer, in comparison to mint tin sized computer. I think it's cute, and of course I bought one. The specification, however, falls short of my vision of an ideal computer.

Of course, it would be nice to have everything, but what I'm really aiming for is a cheap computer that does good enough computing. I still keep one to use as a daily driver when travelling. Raspberry Pi Zero is such a cute and handy computer!

Regarding the performance, it is somewhat lacking. It reminds me of the story of 3M computer specification. It tells a story about how Steve Jobs first heard the term.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer  

which became the driving design of Next Computer: a megabyte of memory, a megapixel display, and a million instructions per second processing power. It is also commonly said that the price should be less than $10,000. 

When I define the specification of a simple yet usable computer, I came up with 3G specification: 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, and 1 Gb Bandwidth. The price should be less than $100. Raspberry Pi Zero didn't quite measure to it: 700 Mhz CPU, 512 kB RAM, and USB2 spec. So, I'd say about half my ideal specification, except the price, which was $10 with WiFi.

Raspberry Pi 4, which I bought as soon as I was able upon release, was in many ways exceeds the specification by about 4 times: 4 cores of 1 GHz CPU or faster, 4 GB RAM, and USB3 bandwidth. The price is $55, quite reasonable for the power and performance. So powerful, in fact, that the only applications that I can possibly max out of it would be 3D rendering and video editing. It mostly just sit idle doing nothing most of the time.

The Invisible Bandwidth

If you notice the difference of specification between the two, the original specification specified MIPS as an important factor. Steve Jobs puts in Display resolution as the important factor. I put Bandwidth as the important factor.

The reason why I don't really care about MIPS and Display is because I don't really use them. I mostly deal with integer calculation, and as far as display resolution is concerned, I'm still stuck with 800x600 resolution. In fact, I regularly set the font to large size, so that I don't have to squint at the display. Yes, I have a large HDMI monitor. No, I'm not a member of Tiny Font Society!

I set all my fonts and menu bar to large size, and I'm really dismayed that most program, including games and productivity tools, regularly set the font to extremely tiny size. Do you all have perfect vision or do you just not care? I think it's mostly the latter, but I really do hate tiny fonts.

As far as Bandwidth specification is concerned, I was clued in to the difference between Personal Computer (PC) and Mainframe Computer. I really like to deal with large amount of data, and the PC works well enough, but on the mainframe computer, I noticed that the processing went by at a much faster rate than the CPU would indicate. This piqued my interest. As I pore over the literature for the difference, I notice that the bandwidth is much larger on the mainframe. There is the answer!

Actually, that's not the whole story. There are several Bandwidth involved. The obvious one is the System Bus for data transfer between CPU and RAM. Then there's the bandwidth between computer and I/O devices. This is Serial, Parallel, or USB. Another set of bandwidth is the bandwidth between main CPU, math co-processor, and graphic co-processor. Nowadays, we have System on a Chip (SOC) architecture where everything is contained in one die. So, the most restrictive bandwidth is the I/O bandwidth, hence Gigabit bandwidth.

Or is it? Remember that I/O stands for Input/Output. Which external device has the slowest data rate? It's not the hard disk, or network, or keyboard. The slowest most restrictive bandwidth remains ignored because it's invisible. It seems like I'm the only one in the world who works on it.

The slowest bandwidth of the system is the bandwidth between keyboard and chair!