5 ms·

I've no intention of taking this challenge but that doesn't mean that I haven't imposed some restrictions on myself in the past! Up until 2018 I was using a Phe

I've no intention of taking this challenge but that doesn't mean that I haven't imposed some restrictions on myself in the past! Up until 2018 I was using a Phenom II X2 unlocked to quad core. It was fast enough for its purposes overall but the main problem was that the browser and websites were so far on it because it didn't have any built-in video codecs. Doing a video call on Google Hangouts at the time was enough to peg the CPU at 100% on all four cores! I used to have a laptop that was a Celeron 1.4ghz with 1.5gb memory. Even with the lightest weight Linux I could load on it, it wouldn't load most web pages.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
> wouldn't load most web pages This seems to be the biggest challenge to overcome, really. Looking at my daily computer usage, much of what I do is browser-based (email, calendar, CRM, connecting with customers -- heck, even the product my company creates is accessed through a web-based console). Web pages these days are so much more than just "web pages" -- they're entire programs, effectively, which means they have hefty requirements. The rest of what I do is console-based, and I can use just about anything with a keyboard, screen, and network connection -- up (down?) to and including my VIC-20.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  Yes, that was the conclusion I came to as well. Websites are no longer documents. They're software. Too bad.
swiley 5y ago
> with 1.5gb memory. Even with the lightest weight Linux I could load on it, it wouldn't load most web pages. That's a bit odd. I used a raspi (1GiB aarch64 sbc with WiFi and SD card) as a desktop in college and while it was unpleasant to have Firefox and LibreOffice open at the same time I don't think I ran into anything that flat out didn't load.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  That's because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore The rpi has hardware video acceleration even just a little bit, and the Celeron 1.4ghz laptop I had did not have any hardware acceleration of any kind. That was the difference really between my Phenom II X4 and the Ryzen 5 1400. Aside from obvious architecture differences, if my Phenom II had the video codecs built in, it'd have been plenty fast. There's more to CPU's than clock speed and basic architecture. Features matter.
  - swiley 5y ago
    I wasn't running any hardware accelerated stuff except for video games. That would (I guess unintuitively) take up more memory.
    - geocrasher 5y ago
      OH I don't mean GPU accelerated, I mean that there are video codecs built into the CPU so they don't have to be done in software. That was the killer for my Phenom II.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago

> wouldn't load most web pages This seems to be the biggest challenge to overcome, really. Looking at my daily computer usage, much of what I do is browser-based (email, calendar, CRM, connecting with customers -- heck, even the product my company creates is accessed through a web-based console). Web pages these days are so much more than just "web pages" -- they're entire programs, effectively, which means they have hefty requirements. The rest of what I do is console-based, and I can use just about anything with a keyboard, screen, and network connection -- up (down?) to and including my VIC-20.

geocrasher 5y ago
Yes, that was the conclusion I came to as well. Websites are no longer documents. They're software. Too bad.

swiley 5y ago

> with 1.5gb memory. Even with the lightest weight Linux I could load on it, it wouldn't load most web pages. That's a bit odd. I used a raspi (1GiB aarch64 sbc with WiFi and SD card) as a desktop in college and while it was unpleasant to have Firefox and LibreOffice open at the same time I don't think I ran into anything that flat out didn't load.

geocrasher 5y ago
That's because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore The rpi has hardware video acceleration even just a little bit, and the Celeron 1.4ghz laptop I had did not have any hardware acceleration of any kind. That was the difference really between my Phenom II X4 and the Ryzen 5 1400. Aside from obvious architecture differences, if my Phenom II had the video codecs built in, it'd have been plenty fast. There's more to CPU's than clock speed and basic architecture. Features matter.
- swiley 5y ago
  I wasn't running any hardware accelerated stuff except for video games. That would (I guess unintuitively) take up more memory.
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    OH I don't mean GPU accelerated, I mean that there are video codecs built into the CPU so they don't have to be done in software. That was the killer for my Phenom II.