Normally no. The introduction of the chip was because the magnetic strip could get demagnetized easily.

However, chip cards can be read easily with a pocket reader. If you have your card in your wallet in your back pocket, it has been shown that your info can be stolen that way.

Many of the new Chip cards are also RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) enabled, meaning they can be energized and read remotely. While usually within 2–4inches, it may be possible for a longer distance.

As to the chip, while protected from normal antistatic shocks, it is possible to apply a high voltage across a couple of the pads and burn it out such as across the GND (Ground) and VPP (Chip Programming Voltage) or VCC (chip Voltage)

RFID works by creating a magnetic field from a coil of wire, usually in a card reader or door badge scanner, but can be carried covertly. For stores preventing theft, at the doors, there will be these stands you have to walk through, although you could easily hide a coil around the frame of the door. As the coil inside the credit card passes through this magnetic field, it generates electricity to power the chip which powers up and transmits its data. All of this happens in less than one second.

Something like this would be built into your passport, credit card, company ID badge, or product theft label. The chip is extremely small and is shown in the middle of the antenna. The larger the surface area of the antenna, and more loops, the more energy you can get from the field you are walking or passing the card through.

To prevent RFID reading when in your pocket, you need one of the card wallets sold for this purpose that has metal plates to block the RFID energy pulse.

Jakob Scherer：
There is no definition of what a chip is, but it typically means an electronic component. A subset of chips are the semiconductor chips and encompass several technologies like Silicon, Germanium, and others as the base material. A semiconductor chip may be a single transistor or a diode or other discrete components with single functions, or it may contain multiple components integrated on a single chip, called an integrated circuit. An integrated circuit may be relatively simple with only a handful of active elements, like logic gate chips, or it could be very complex with millions or billions of active elements, like microcomputer chips or memories. So all integrated circuits are chips, but not all chips are integrated circuits.

William Mays：
I assert that a thick-film integrated circuit, or a thin-film integrated circuit, are not to be called “chips”, the term “chip” is reserved for a semiconductor part.

Jakob Scherer：
You are right. Unless the thick- or thin-film circuit is purely passive, it probably has chips on it, packet or naked.

Oisin Daffyd：
It’s the same difference as there is between a bicycle and a bike, a plane and an aircraft.

A single component by the way is an SMD (Surface Mounted Device) and in over 40 years of experience in servicing, I’ve never heard it referred to as a ‘chip’

Jakob Scherer：
An active SMD device has one (or several) semiconductor chips in it. It could be a single function or an IC chip. I started working about the same time as you for a company that builds automatic machines to put chips into devices. Such machines are called die bonders. They are widely used to pick chips from cut wafers and glue them onto lead frames as the first step to make SMD devices.

Apple has been working on ARM since before 1993, far longer than anyone other than ARM themselves

Apple helped Acorn Computers co-found ARM (Apple-supplied millions in investment and owned 20% of ARM)

Apple was the first company to actually use an ARM processor in a consumer product, in the 1993 Apple Newton MessagePad

Apple has been working on developing ARM as a next-generation processor since before 1993

Intel has not changed its old fashioned thinking so its processors (and AMD) are still fully dependent on old designs which are huge, run extremely hot, and use massive amounts of power

Apple expended billion of dollars to assemble a world-class chip design team and to put decades of time into creating a processor (family) that uses the latest 21st Century techniques and thinking, to deliver a processor that is faster, smaller, and cooler than all of Intel’s and AMD’s ancient offerings

Conclusion:

Apple has developed a better processor because Apple cares enough to invent into creating the kind of processor that Apple customers need and want.

What are the pros and cons of the new Apple M1 chip?

It’s blazing fast. Goes like clappers. Faster, according to benchmarks, than any equivalent Intel offering.

It’s almost unbelievably power efficient, using half the power (or less!) of similar Intel chips.

Its onboard graphics beats most midrange discrete GPUs.

It has a built-in machine learning/neural net processor, something you can’t get at all from Intel or AMD processors.

It is a call to arms for Intel to up their game.

How powerful is the Apple M1 chip?

The M1 was designed for a power-efficient, on-the-go application in Macbooks. So considering that, it’s a superb chip for 90% of the target audience.

Because the M1 chip is an SoC, or “System On a Chip” – and is designed to be task-specific and engineered to work with the operating system, unlike the Intel chips which are “off the shelf” parts.

In short, the CPU (central processing unit), GPU (graphics processor), DRAM (memory), and a few other processors share the same chip. The result is somewhat counter-intuitive – most people would assume separate components would be better-performing, the opposite is true with this chip.

Why?

Its integrated design allows the different processors to communicate with each other much faster. There’s less physical space that signals have to travel, and its integrated design makes memory available to both processors.

In layman’s terms, all the necessary resources are within reach. You can reach for a cell phone in your pocket much faster than having to run to a different room to answer the phone mounted on a wall. It requires less energy for the various system components to communicate with each other.

With efficiency comes more speed and less power consumption, and less heat.

However, there are perceivable drawbacks as well. For example, you can’t upgrade your RAM. Certain apps that you could run on an Intel-based MAC (including an emulated instance of Windows x64) aren’t going to happen.

In short, it’s like a super-duper iPad or iPhone that is designed to run macOS – and since it was designed specifically for the task, it can do it better than most Intel chips.

I hope this was general enough to understand.

All of the reviews have proven that Apple’s Apple Silicon processors are in fact much more powerful than Intel’s CPUs.

The 5 best Intel & AMD single board computers for makers

1. Rock Pi X – x86 on the cheap

2. ODYSSEY-X86J4125 – Intel meets Arduino & Raspberry Pi

3. UP Single Board Computer Family – Cherry Trail to Tiger Lake

4. ODROID-H2+ – Affordable 2.5GbE networking

5. UDOO Bolt – AMD SBC’s for makers

Here are some of our panelists’ comments, also welcome you to join the discussion.

Tonny: The sanest one is android H2+

Piotr: Or just any mini ITX or thin mini ITX as those custom boards have really bad pricing.

Dgp: I haven’t seen many consumer ITX boards with things like GPIO broken out.

Piotr: you can use any Arduino/Microcontroller board you want. And depending on the motherboard it may have COM/Serial GPIO or on the back I/O. And if you go on Aliexpress looking for pico/nano ITX boards then you can ones with lots of serial ports and alike.

Anything that isn’t Raspberry, Arduino, or MicroPython will have tragic support for third-party libraries so even if a custom SBC has GPIO – if it’s not using pre-existing software stack it will be hard to use with more complex stuff if at all.

Gerald: Mini PCs or better a Motherboard with embedded CPU bundle make more sense price-wise than these SBC options

Anonymous: A weak CPU is fine if the price is right.

Odroid-H2+ looks like the sweet spot to me. If they keep about the same price point but update it with new Atom CPUs in the future (Tremont / Jasper Lake, then Gracemont, etc.), it will get very good.

Chas: I think the Alix/APU boards from pcengines.ch should also be on this list.

Willy: That’s a pretty good point, they do provide rich connectivity and good characteristics at quite an affordable price! And they do have an enclosure and a console port, both of which are often the last missing points to put an SBC in a small production.

David: All of the PC Engines x86 compatible 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800 based ALIX boards are currently marked End Of Life (EOL). I suspect the old LX800 part is the reason. The faster x86 compatible AMD GX-412TC quad-core Jaguar Architecture-based APU2/3/4 boards are still current.

Garry: Each SBC has its advantages and disadvantages, the key is what you need.

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