Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8GB Core i5
BORK!BORK!BORK! Paris might sometimes be called "The City of Light" or perhaps "The City of Love" by the romantically inclined. Judging by this hotel's elevators, "The City of Bork" is more appropriate.
Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Nathaniel in a Paris hotel, what we assume to be digital signage is instead stalled on the all too familiar American Megatrends BIOS configuration screen. The computer behind the scenes also seems a bit overpowered to serve information for hotel services.
Instead of enticing elevator riders into the undoubtedly delightful bars and restaurants of the establishment (apparently a Novotel not far from the Eiffel Tower) or whatever it should be doing, this screen has temptations of an altogether more technical nature.
A CometLake CPU? An i5 no less? Sort of up-to-date. And that 8 GB of RAM? The way memory prices are going, that might be enough to buy you a nice hotel room in some cities, and at least a decent coffee and a croque monsieur in Paris.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/07/15/software-bloat-this-elevator-needs-an-8gb-core-i5/5270901Open linkView original on pawb.social
51 replies
I feel seen
Is it inflation or 8GB of ram and x86-64 gaming capable CPUs in everything with buttons
I went into a store that sells grills. They all had screens. On a fucking barbecue.
I just want a box that makes fire.
Webber Kettle grill. BYOF but no screen in sight.
Two of the best meals of my entire life were made on Weber kettle grills
There is 2 things to this, its cheaper to buy hardware like a raspberry pi or similar with 8gb of ram and use that to build the elevator. And it might genuinely easier to source the parts and future spare parts.
But as a developer I want to be snarky and say why does a elevator need 8GB, it should have 256MB and use 168 MB max where 100 MB is display graphics and music, 5 is the control system with 3 copies of the variable for redundancy and the rest is telemetry and a memory leak that eats 1MB every 2 weeks because someone is resizing the audio buffer for floor announcements everytime.
But its probably just a mini pc that's using 512Mb all in all running some linux distro. and the 8GB is just not being used.
Raspberry pi’s are unreliable POS. We use some at work to just display a static web page that refreshes a few times an hour and somehow they fail at that. They’re good enough for us since we’re just an office showing some stats. But this is proper digital signage.
For something like this where you really need 100% uptime (except for this) there’s a whole army of specialty PCs built for this role. Passive cooking so there’s no fan to fail, beefy over built power supplies, and usually some built in special IO. They’ll usually have hardware watchdogs too, that’ll reboot the system if it’s not responding.
Honestly speaking, using readily available hardware instead of specialty made to operate an elevator isn't a bad idea.
The elevator probably cost $250,000. The i5 is a laptop chip. I’m sure it’s part of a fanless industrial embedded system. I can’t imagine why this is even news.
Arduino-like could be enough and its easy to buy/replace
It's an elevator, you could run it on a PLC with some ladder logic.
Honestly considering the age of this motherboard and cpu. This is legitimately cheaper than a raspberry pi now if you buy used and it’s a lot more powerful. I would also imagine that’ll it’ll be stuck in this elevator forever because why upgrade hardware when this nugget can still show ads completely disconnected from the elevator computer since it’s been doing since 2020. Maybe I would consider this absurd back during the end of Covid but not really that much now. Considering I can buy this for under a hundred dollars on eBay and you should probably be considering as well especially if you wanna run Linux on a cheap machine. Like yeah the ram is probably soldered onto the motherboard and it’s a laptop cpu with integrated graphics worse than that of the intel hd graphics 4000 in my 2012 MacBook. But like you can do a lot with this nugget.
Meanwhile, Apollo had only 2 Mhz and 36 KB memory and navigated to the fucking moon.
And a few thousand people working 24/7.
It's a lost art for sure. I wrote a graphic OS for an instrument my company uses in the field. I had 2 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage to work with, and the latter had to include space for a data logger, so the code effectively had to reside in about a quarter of that.
It gave me a lot of respect for the original Mac OS. Graphic OS with 128 KB of RAM and 400 KB floppy for storage. The latter had to have room for the OS itself + apps + user documents. They did "cheat" somewhat by having a 64 KB ROM to help with the graphics library.
But the lengths they went to to squeeze every last bit of capability out of the hardware was legendary. For example, Wozniak wrote a floppy driver that varied the spin rate depending on which track was being read. He reasoned the outer tracks could hold more data thanks to the greater diameter if the spin were slowed down.
Not using an elevator though
They haven't installed the ropes yet.
I never get tired of this comparison, esp. with the smartphone in your hand.
One can push it further: ALL of the computing power used for/during the moonlanding has been surpassed by any smartphone, by orders of magnitude.
And required constant monitoring and manual input...
The problem is inefficency exacerbated by the requirement of pesky things like graphics
Decent chance they are running windows 10 or 11 and running some web browser app for getting and displaying whatever its supposed to. Thats probably several levels of isolation for something thats already trusted
With a nice user interface noone is going to ever be looking at unless something stops working
Significantly cheaper to develop at the expence of performance
Even with graphics, you can simply compare the performance and colors of what you had back in the 90s with the bloated bullshit of today - the only exception being video, stuff today much better compressed with low quality loss. On the other hand, electron.
4k definition in screens below 16" is wasteful beyond belief.
Do they make less than 4k definition on 16" screens any more?
Elevators require constant input of where to go too though
Overkill, yes but also almost surely just a standardized hardware set the company uses regardless of the specific advertising situation.
This set of hardware can run 99% of their client requirements and requires only a single hardware configuration to support. Maybe a couple generations of support as time goes on before older hardware is replaced.
Could this particular use case be handled by something as simple as a raspberry pi? Probably, but almost surely not everything the company that provides the hardware/service/support handles for clients.
Is this part of the elevator, or an advertising billboard installed in the elevator?
Silly goose, they're one and the same!
No, they very much aren't. I doubt this actually has anything to do with the function of the elevator at all.
Probably. But even for a billboard this is overkill!
It is probably the cheapest computer you can buy brand new which you can connect to the Internet to deploy the ads.
Probably not cheapest over all, but cheapest standardized system the advertising company/IT support company they use has. If they can handle even 90% of client needs with this hardware, it means easier and more efficient support on the back end.
If the system isn't standard, that means the company has to eat the labor costs for assembly and possibly some hardware support.
At a certain point, going lower spec means sourcing hardware that's no longer being produced or putting together the components yourself rather than buying a prefabricated system.
Elevator manufacturers sell the displays with their elevators more often than not. The PC is not installed in the elevator, but in the machine room, and the video is being extended alongside the cabling used for the elevator itself.
Meanwhile my company keeps using NUCs to control 9 live video feeds per NUC. And when they inevitably keep crashing because of thermal throttling/dust build up after around a year, they just replace them.
Do you get to keep them?
No we even have security checks when leaving the premises. We yearly hear about firings (through the grapevine) because of theft. You can easily steal 1000s worth in equipment everyday.
If they’re replacing them, doesn’t that mean they are binning the replaced devices? Why would the company care if you take the device home without the drive? Are they getting a kickback from the recycling company?
I assume they RMA them or bin them. I genuinely don't know, not my department. I think they work with HP because nearly everything is HP.
They likely go with HP because their HP rep convinced them it was a better option than Dell, tbh. Most places I’ve worked were fine with me rerouting hardware to my trunk instead of the bin, so it never hurts to ask. But yeah if you’re removed from that particular team it’d be an awkward conversation for sure so I don’t blame you for not asking.
We got so far into "hardware is cheap" / "developers are expensive" / abstraction positive feedback loop, we are using a Raspberry Pi to blink a LED, but on a global scale.
Nah we're usong an i5 to blink an LED
Shouldn't we go with an i7 so we get more cores?
So it's not AI data centers after all, elevators are driving the RAM shortage!!!1!
"I lift things up and put them down."
Elevators are Determinite Finite Autonomas ffs. In my theoretical computer science course in college, I wrote a DFA program in python that would have fit on an Arduino.
It sounds like this is running the advertising screen in the elevator, rather than controlling the elevator itself.
That said, I have a screen on my desk being run by an ESP32 chip. It just pulls the image from a backend web server and redraws the screen. No full scale OS needed.
I wonder to how many more digital signs all over the world this applies to.
Literally all of them. They’re all hideously overkill for displaying a jpeg. But you can’t buy a newly made pentium 4, so you have to go with what’s in production.
On top of that they’re probably running windows too. Not even some slimmed down Linux.
On the other hand, considering the cost of custom designing this elevator, building and installing it, the choice of hardware in this single place is rather neglectable.
Most elevator runs on Windows XP...
The Flintstones didn't even use computers in their elevators.