4 ms·

This reminds me of the good ol' days of the "Turbo" button on computers. Seriously, why would anyone purposefully half the clock speed of their processor?

• leoc 16y ago
  It was for compatibility with older PC software that made unfortunate timing assumptions, wasn't it? (I wasn't there at the time.)
• jff 16y ago
  When you write a program that does its timing using idle loops... old games, for instance, got really silly when they suddenly ran at 25 MHz instead of 8.
• Tuna-Fish 16y ago
  Many old programs were written without proper timers -- for example, in many old games if the processor ran twice as fast, everything happened twice as fast. Also, completely unrelated, but the processor in the computer you are using right now is very probably presently running at less than half of it's maximum speed.
  • harisenbon 16y ago
    Yup, I remember my copy of f-15 Strike Eagle for the tandy 1000. When we got a new 486 with the turbo button, I wondered what would happen with my game... Suddenly my plane was going fast enough to fly over Syria 2 times a second.
  • jrockway 16y ago
    Also, completely unrelated, but the processor in the computer you are using right now is very probably presently running at less than half of it's maximum speed. But of course, for very good reason: it allows the computer to remain on for 10 hours instead of 10 minutes. Power saving is a big deal these days, but back in the 386 days, nobody cared (and 4.77MHz processors were not exactly power-hungry either).
    • SimonPStevens 16y ago
      Possibly, a reason, but I think the main reason is to do with scale manufacturing costs and efficiencies. It's fairly common practise to make 1 high spec version of a chip and then lock parts of it to make the budget versions. For example, the AMD Phenom "Toliman" (X3) and "Kuma" (X2) CPUs are just "Agena" (X4) chips with 1 or 2 cores disabled. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_microprocessors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_microprocess...) When the X4 chips are manufactured they are tested, and if a core fails any tests it is just locked and sold as an X3/2. This increases manufacturing yields by making use of some of the failures. Of course as there is also higher demand for the lower-middle spec CPUs, sometimes perfectly working chips are restricted to meet the supply requirements for each market space. And of course, often the different clock speeds are really just the same chips with locked multipliers. I believe Sony followed a similar procedure for the PS3 cell CPUs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29#Commercialization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29#Comme...
  • malux85 16y ago
    This is the correct reason for the turbo buttons. Most of the program delays (especially in games) was done inside really basic things like // Delay for(int i = 0; i <= 10000; i++) { // Do nothing } This was a bad way of putting delays in the game / program. I remember when I was young, getting about 10 386 computers and mounting them on the wall of my bedroom (being young and obcessed with star trek, I wanted to turn my room into a borg cube) .. I wrote programs that used the parallel port to flash big arrays LED's on and off. Being young, I didn't know how to do timing properly on these machines so I used FOR loops like the one above for delays ... the Turbo button allowed me to half the speed of the faster machines while running the same code on all of them. p.s. The unfortunate side effect of putting 'tight' loops of code in your program as delays meant that the processors got very hot very quickly (this was back when processors didn't necessarily have fans on them). I ended up being ordered to de-construct my borg bedroom when the wallpaper set fire after a chip got hot!
    • mahmud 16y ago
      I remember when I was young, getting about 10 386 computers Huh? you had 10 computers? why? how?
      • malux85 16y ago
        Friend of a Friend ... his dad worked in a high tech lab and their machines got upgraded ... I literally rescued them before they went into the skip (they were rich, selling them was more trouble than it was worth) I had great fun with those machines ... including daisy chaining them all up COM1 -> COM2 -> COM1 -> COM2 and writing a chess program in C to have the machines play games against each other ... took me YEARS to do, but great fun and learnt heaps.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
    Robotron FTW! Completely unplayable on anything faster than a 386/66MHz unless you have superhuman reactions.
• robryan 16y ago
  It was kind of fun for about a minute watching things slow down to a crawl.
• wlievens 16y ago
  To finish that Micromachines level that was pretty much undoable at normal speed.