6 ms·
Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can
by kristopolous 6y ago
Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task.
The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening.
In this whole exercise I've learned something valuable:
This is all very reasonable.
If someone told me they'd spend an immense effort to speed something up by 0.15 seconds I would think them extremely foolish. That 0.15 seconds translates to 60 seconds on the P90.
My AMD has literally 1,000 times more memory than the P90.
If someone said they spent some enormous effort and took the memory footprint of something from 40MB down to 28MB I'd think they're just doing a hobby but of course on the P90 that's 10% of the memory available.
As machines have progressed, the great wins of the past have become nearly unmeasurable noise.
The OpenSSH server, for example, a fairly competently written piece of software, takes about 8 seconds to serve me a password prompt.
People aren't being foolish or irresponsible or naive in not caring about these things, they're being sensible. Running a Pentium 90 with modern software --- that's the actual unreasonable hobby here.
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Here's me doing a
* side-by-side gcc compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUk9f7Nv2dM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUk9f7Nv2dM
* trying to play a video I had transcoded to 160x120 in a futile attempt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMTz5PNpkcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMTz5PNpkcw (original video I'm attempting to play is here: https://shop.cpurecords.net/track/sheffield-bleep https://shop.cpurecords.net/track/sheffield-bleep)
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Edit: I'll give y'all access.
* telnet bootstra386.com:1994
* ssh bootstra386.com:1995
* user/pass: hn/hn
cat /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo if you want to gawk. I've put some nice things in /usr/pkg/bin. Try not to wreck it.
- StavrosK 6y agoWhat kind of P90 did you find that has 128 MB of RAM? My P100 had 16... It could play (and encode!) mp3s just fine, though.
- kristopolous 6y agoit was a server class machine. It's a Micron tower. I'm using 4 32MB 72 pin EDO modules. I can get a model number if you really want. It also has a PATA card to support the larger disk (I'm using 20GB) and has a PCI USB card to support well, basically anything (it's kinda fun using a wireless keyboard on it).
- StavrosK 6y agoOooh, beefy.
- kristopolous 6y agoI use it as a deskstand so its rather inaccessible without 10 minutes of work but here's photo I found http://getpostdelete.com/PXL_20201126_073138155.jpg http://getpostdelete.com/PXL_20201126_073138155.jpg
- StavrosK 6y agoOh man, the memories. Mine looks similar, drab gray box and all.
- kristopolous 6y agoI've given it a homepage now, made it publicly accessible and am streaming it on twitch http://bootstra386.com/~hn/ http://bootstra386.com/~hn/
- StavrosK 6y agoHaha, very nice. I half-expected a stream of a camera just pointing at the box, but this is obviously better.
- b0rsuk 6y agoYou're talking to someone who owns a threadripper, what did you expect?
- wnkrshm 6y agoI might be wrong but that should also depend on the bitrate of the mp3 - ofc with the high bitrates of today's audio, the older cpu night struggle.
- StavrosK 6y agoI don't think so, it was fine with any bitrate. It was around 120% of real-time, but it'd get the job done at any bitrate (perhaps more slowly).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoMy families P90 had 128MB of RAM. It was a Zeos
- lobster45 6y agoMy Pentium 60 I bought in 1995 for $2200 came with 4 mb of RAM. I later upgraded it to 8 mb. 540 MB hard drive, 2x CD ROM drive. It ran just about everything I had until I built my next computer in ‘98
- StavrosK 6y agoThree years isn't that long, I built my next computer in 2002... You could barely move the mouse before swapping started.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- silon42 6y ago> mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) If you mean command line tools, this is a bit surprising (assuming no pulse audio). >As machines have progressed, the great wins of the past have become nearly unmeasurable noise. I bet they are measurable when you get the cloud bill...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kristopolous 6y agoI think I got it with an "nas" version of mpg123. I have the test audio in the home directory. You can try it out yourself Here's a youtube livestream of the machine. The monitor is hooked up and running X under the hn user account along with a set of speakers. You can feel free to run things with the DISPLAY=:0 environment set. Have fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcA8kiqd_n4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcA8kiqd_n4
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoThe interesting thing is that in their day we used those devices to do real work. The main thing that sticks in my mind wasn't the slowness but the lack of stability. Rebooting/reinstalling to fix issues was very common.
- rwmj 6y agoThey were rock solid running Linux. I remember we had a 486 where the jiffies counter overflowed (which is what happened on 386/486-era Linux after ~ 497 days). We expected it would crash then, but the machine kept running just fine.
- moron4hire 6y agoThey really weren't. It took lots of configuration tweaks and careful selection of the right software. People could and did do the same thing with Windows back then. But trying to use a PC for general purpose work, straight out of the box, stability was a problem on all extent desktop operating systems.
- rwmj 6y agoI was there and this is utter nonsense. Windows crashed all the time, and Linux was rock solid with years of uptime.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoYou have to distinguish between Windows NT and 95/98/Me. I was installing a lot of servers back then and NT was way ahead of Linux in nearly every way.
- magicalhippo 6y agoFor me the Pentium was where it started to shift. My 468 got booted several times a day, not just from stability but having to mess with IRQ settings and whatnot for my ISA soundcard etc. When I installed Windows 2000 on my Pentium 150 box it was pretty much rock solid. Proper memory protection and PCI made life so much better.
- pjc50 6y agoI remember that my libretto 30 could play mp3s, but only with the Fraunhofer decoder - winamp took too much CPU.
- badsectoracula 6y agoThat your P90 is slow to run modern software is largely because modern software is bloated. You mention: > mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening. But a P90 could not only play wav files (in fact my 386 with 4MB of RAM could play and edit wav files in realtime just fine under Windows 3.1) but also both decode and play mp3 files at the background while doing other tasks in Windows 95. That mpv and mplayer are not able to do that shows that they require way more resources than is really necessary to perform the task at hand. > People aren't being foolish or irresponsible or naive in not caring about these things, they're being sensible. Running a Pentium 90 with modern software --- that's the actual unreasonable hobby here. That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters. And being unable or hard to run modern software on a P90 is because of the state of current software, but that doesn't mean software has to be like that because it is "modern" - someone explicitly made a choice to develop the software in a way that causes it to be like that.
- The_Colonel 6y ago> That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters. Developer work is expensive and there's always a backlog of fixes and features. Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. This time could be spend developing features with actual user impact.
- badsectoracula 6y agoRight, this is the usually the most common reason brought up. And depending on the situation, it is correct - it is the "depends on other matters" part i wrote.
- mbirth 6y ago
- imhoguy 6y ago> * telnet bootstra386.com:1994 > * ssh bootstra386.com:1995 Ha! These port numbers made my day:)
- samoa42 6y agomight be an interesting comparison with a netbsd release from the era
- kristopolous 6y agoI had similar hardware 15-20 years ago (my laptop was about the same specs, just maybe 16mb ram?) and I ran NetBSD 1.4.x on it. This was before pkgin so you had to use the ports collection and compile or use the fairly simple pkg_add system. For web browsing I did dillo and links -g ... it worked on a lot of the internet which at the time still did not heavily rely on stylesheets and javascript for baseline functionality. For email reading I used one of the many terminal readers, I believe pine. For instant messaging I used naim. Social networking through websites wasn't a thing yet nor was youtube. I used mpg123 to do music and I believe I ran in screen without X up most of the time. Before that I had an IBM 360c (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_360) with 8MB of ram. I used I believe NetBSD 1.2 on that. I could even recompile the kernel without hitting swap with some very interesting gcc flags that I have long forgotten - but it still took I believe most of a day (maybe 7 hours?). NetBSD 1.6 was really where the split began ... the priorities were different and things seemed slower. It is mostly meant for academics and research so this ultimately makes sense. It's like a lifetime ago. So when I got this up and running, NetBSD was exactly what I turned to. It's different of course now. But the P90 is surprisingly able to reasonably keep up as long as you have patience and modest expectations.
- hansor 6y agoHi. I recently bought some 386SX 25Mhz laptop to develop some software as well, and I worked on low-end hardware for over decade as well(for fun!) My findings: You could run NetBSD 1.3.1 on just 2MB of RAM. You can play mp3 on 486DX 66Mhz with mpg123 and madplay if you change the output to 22khz and few other flags. Pentium 100 was enough back in the 2001 to run Slackware 7, BeOS and NetBSD 1.6.1 with mp3(in lower quality), Opera web browser, few consoles, text editor - at same time without hassle, AND burning cd-rom at the same time. Then GOOGLE "invited" Ajax in 2004 and now even computer with 2gb of ram and 1.6Ghz dual cpu, can't open simple page with JS without serious stutter...
- moron4hire 6y agoMicrosoft invented AJAX. Google popularized it and developed V8 to make large scale JavaScript applications feasible. Both originally did what they did for email clients.
- alliao 6y agoalternatively, let's say we will hit some kind of physical/innovation barrier one day, and we no longer have more hardware to throw at things.. suddenly any optimization feels like an upgrade? Almost akin to the recent M1 vs Intel CPU progress...