Month: December 2020

Enlarge / This panoramic image shows the Chang'e 5 lander and the lunar landscape. (credit: CNSA)

Less than a day after its Chang'e 5 probe made a soft landing on the Moon, the China National Space Administration has released both a short video showing the spacecraft's descent to the surface as well as a high-definition image of the lunar landscape.

The panoramic surface image, highlighting the Oceanus Procellarum region where the spacecraft landed, is especially jaw-dropping. It shows the lander and one of its legs in the foreground, with the lunar surface stretching off to the horizon. This zoomable image, which measures 15,000×7,947 pixels, provides incredible detail about small rocks near the lander, as well as the indentation made by the landing leg in the Moon's surface.

The sped-up video of the descent clearly shows the Chang'e 5 lander undergoing deceleration, reorienting itself, avoiding hazards, and then hovering before coming in for a final landing.

Enlarge / Ken Keiter gets ready to tear apart the SpaceX Starlink user terminal, "Dishy McFlatface." (credit: Ken Keiter)

Engineer Ken Keiter recently came into possession of one SpaceX Starlink user terminal, the satellite dish that SpaceX nicknamed "Dishy McFlatface." But instead of plugging it in and getting Internet access from SpaceX's low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, Keiter decided to take Dishy apart to see what's inside.

The teardown process destroyed portions of the device. "I would love to actually test out the [Starlink] service and clearly I didn't get a chance to, as this went a little bit further than I was intending," Keiter said toward the end of the 55-minute teardown video he posted on YouTube last week.

Keiter, who lives in Portland, Oregon, was impressed by the Starlink team's work. "It's rare to see something of this complexity in a consumer product," he said in reference to the device's printed circuit board (PCB), which he measured at 19.75" by 21.5".

Enlarge / The Snapdragon 888, sitting on the world's biggest ARM motherboard. (credit: Qualcomm)

This week Qualcomm announced its flagship smartphone SoC for 2021, the "Snapdragon 888." The TL;DR is that Qualcomm's 2021 chip is a 5nm SoC with an ARM Cortex-X1 core and Qualcomm's first flagship SoC with an on-board 5G modem, dumping the mandatory two-chip 5G solution that Qualcomm forced on the industry earlier this year with the Snapdragon 865. Compared to the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm is promising performance improvements of 25 percent from the CPU, 35 percent from the GPU, and 35 percent from the ISP.

We should probably talk about the name first. Qualcomm's normal naming scheme (and the rumor mill) would have made this chip the "Snapdragon 875" after the 865, 855, and 845 from previous years. The switch to Snapdragon 888 is apparently a nod to Chinese culture, which views 8 as a lucky number. Flight numbers out of Chinese airports often have a lot of eights in them, the Beijing Olympics began on 8/8/08 at eight seconds past 8:08pm local time, and now flagship Android phones will somehow be more appealing—I guess—to Chinese consumers, which also happen to make up the biggest smartphone market in the world. Marketing!

As usual, the CPU is sporting a very lucky eight cores with a single "Prime" core for higher performance duties, three medium cores to help out with foreground tasks, and four low-power cores for background processing. This year the prime core is getting upgraded to ARM's big, new Cortex-X1 core at 2.84GHz, while the medium cores are getting upgraded to the Cortex A78. The ancient A55 core is still working smaller-core duties.