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

[Jeff Chapin]

Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
I would think that an application such as being used on the space 
shuttle would require an obscene amount of testing and validity 
checking, and that pretty much everything on a CPU needs to be tested, 
even features not in use, and that the code needs to be heavily tested, 
etc. Changing the CPUs, even to the extent of adding a few features is 
probably problematic, and an amazing amount of work.

I would also think that the power consumption, heat output, etc are all 
accounted for and changing that would cause a cascade of other things 
needing modified or tests.