Yeah exactly, we now have so many layers of stuff. On top of vmem & OS, add high def displays, and today’s corporate firewall and malware scanning. I wouldn’t be surprised if just booting my Win 11 laptop, logging in, and launching Teams uses more compute than the entire Galileo mission used over its entire 8 year run. :P

Even without the layers & cruft though, the raw perf is astounding to those of us who remember 8 bit 1Mhz microprocessors. Today’s gamers are used to double-digit teraflops(!) of compute, just to render all the pixels for Minecraft or Fortnite.

I don’t know if there’s a better way these days, but for me Arduino has been an easy & super fun way to futz with a tiny bare metal microprocessor.