Re:What? More 8-Bit Microcontrollers?
by sudosysgen on Friday July 01, 2022 @03:14PM
(#31951311)
10 cents for 1 million boilers is only 100k. That's about the price of an additional engineer, so it may very well be worth it to move up in abstraction instead.
What should I do with an extra engineer? Should I hire one just for the sake of moving up in abstraction?
100k saved is 100k earned. Half a Ferrari.
Re:What? More 8-Bit Microcontrollers?
by sudosysgen on Saturday July 02, 2022 @12:20AM
(#31956207)
It's exactly the reverse. You need fewer engineers because it's going to be much easier to write the same code at a higher level of abstraction. So you can have that engineer work on something that's going to make you revenue, or hire one less dev.
This has a cost. Even saving a marginal 10 cents can make a difference.
Even if we live long enough to see a 10 cents microcontroller with 1GB of RAM/FLASH, there will be a $0.000001 part using the same technology but with 2K RAM and 16K storage.
If I'll be making millions of boilers, guess which one I will use.
> Programming has essentially turned into scripting.
Hard real time applications disagree with this. And remember that someone still has to lay the foundations to run scripts in an MCU.
> There's no need to learn anything anymore
I heard the same thing and several variants, 20 years ago when .NET came out.