Companies are going all-in on artificial intelligence right now, investing millions or even billions into the area while slapping the AI initialism on their products, even when doing so seems strange and pointless.
Heavy investment and increasingly powerful hardware tend to mean more expensive products. To discover if people would be willing to pay extra for hardware with AI capabilities, the question was asked on the TechPowerUp forums.
The results show that over 22,000 people, a massive 84% of the overall vote, said no, they would not pay more. More than 2,200 participants said they didn’t know, while just under 2,000 voters said yes.
No, but I would pay good money for a freely programmable FPGA coprocessor.
If the AI chip is implemented as one, and is useful for other things I’m sold.
I think manufacturers need to get a lot more creative about simplified computing. The RPi Pico’s GPIO engine is powerful yet simple, and a good example of what is possible with some good application analysis and forethought.
Problem for the big market is that it’s hardly profitable. In fact make things too easily multipurpose and you undercut your specialized devices opportunities. Why buy a smart device for 500 dollars that requires a monthly subscription when you could get a 100 dollar device with a popular preload of a solution on it?
Like when the WRT54G came out in the day and OpenWRT basically drove Cisco to buy out Linksys to neuter the “home router” to stop it displacing expensive products in the business sector. The WRT54G was the best product for the market, but not the best product to exist for vendor profitablity.
I have few pi pico but i didn’t knew about it, can you please elaborate, because I’ve been using them just like any other esp32 stm32 esp8266 i have
Whichnoart of the pico are you referring to specifically? Never heard the term “GPIO engine” before. Is that sort of like the USB stack but for GPIO?
I think they meant PIO (programmable IO). It’s like a small processor tied to some of the IO pins. There’s a very small set of instructions and some state machines.
It can be used to implement your own IO protocols without worrying about the issues that come with bit-banging from the cpu.
The GPIO engine is a simple state machine that can be programmed to implement high-speed data transfer, digital video output, and many other purposes. It is one of the best and most innovative features on the Pico.