[Cialug] Fast 486's and jumbo shrimp (was: Which Distro is best?)

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 10:23 AM, Dan Sloan <dan.sloan at drake.edu> wrote:
> That's not so mind blowing...
>
> Last I heard the space shuttles still run on the 386 CPU...and that was an
> upgrade from the 8086.  They also use ferrite core memory because of its
> resistance to radiation.

That's not so mind blowing to me. If you want to run a GUI desktop
application or a TCP/IP server accepting thousands of connections,
then a 386 feels far underpowered. But if you're doing calculations a
40 (or even 20) Mhz cpu with fpu really can do a lot. Especially with
highly optimized code.

Sometime explore how much of the time our desktop CPUs spend in an
idle loop or performing NOOPs.

What's interesting to me is when I run across tasks that really do
start to give the cpu a work out. Recent ones I've noticed:

 * some websites with a lot of javascript will kick my cpu fan on
 * photo slide show screen saver
 * music player visualizations
 * converting a video

Other than that, my laptop usually keeps one of the cpu cores turned
off and the other one on low power mode. I will note that its nice
having the dual core and speed step so that when you want the cpu
power its there. But most of the time the cpu sits idle waiting for
something to do.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode