[AtlasBarfed]

I wish there was a "works for Pentium III" label that would help indicate that the app's usability hits necessary minimums on a 1Ghz Pentium III computer. IMO that would be a good optimization floor for avoiding the hidden monstrosity of electron apps and that type of stuff.

If your McCrud app can't be responsive on a baseline 1Ghz PIII with 1GB of RAM, then there needs to be some sort of shame pushback. Moore's law is effectively coming to a close, there will need to be more optimization in the future.

[mrtranscendence]

Why Pentium III? That's nearly 25 years old. You couldn't run Windows 10 on such a processor, let alone a modern browser, and a $200 mobile phone would beat it in benchmarks. Surely you can have a higher floor than that.

[AtlasBarfed]

The Pentium III was the around a half a gigahertz, and we were starting to get into multi-hundreds of gigabytes.

... that sounds small compared to today's specs, but IMO this is when PCs had plenty of horsepower to run "real" operating systems (32-bit preemptive multitasking), "real" browsers, 3D gaming was into it's fifth year or so, etc.

So this wouldn't be a badge where you say "wow we fit it into this impossibly limited device". The dirty secret of the PC business is that this hardware spec is more than enough for practically all productivity and browsing (and video with hardware acceleration). Now, high polygon high res high antialiased games... but that has actual hardware horsepower needs you can quantify.

The amount of wasted resources from the year 2000 to now is stupefying. Intel and AMD love it! DRAM makers love it! But as an industry we have squandered the last two decades (and the last two decades of CPU improvement), right as gigahertz scaling disappeared, Moore's law is probably going to collapse under its economic weight, Amdahl's law says parallelism won't save us forever.

So if I look at some software and wonder why this relatively straightforward app is hogging along on a PC that is effectively 10-50x faster than a Pentium III 500Mhz (8x-10x in clock speed, then massive improvements to cache, branch prediction, multiple ALUs, speculative execution)... something is wrong.

[com2kid]

Google Maps ran like a dream on Pentium M systems back in 2005. Gmail was also smooth as butter.

Pentium M was a derivative of the Pentium III design.

Ignoring high resolution image assets, there is no reason a website shouldn't degrade and be able run on any machine faster than 300mhz.

[toastal]

Works on a KaiOS feature phone support would be a relevant metric today with similar goals that you mention. They explicitly state in their docs that React will be too heavy for your app.

[marcosdumay]

Is there some VM that allows limiting the CPU to a performance similar to a P4? (A PIII is way too bad for my tastes.)

I imagine Linux would have a bad time running in it.

[com2kid]

Pretty sure PIII's beat P4s at a lot of benchmarks. :-D Thus why AMD is around today.

[marcosdumay]

Well, I was using AMD at the time.

AFAIK, the P4 faced badly on jump-happy code, but this was not common enough to be a problem on the real world when compared to a PIII. It was also a power hog, that could barely outrun a snail if you didn't have proper thermal management, but that also doesn't means the processor is slow.

[com2kid]

I should have specified perf / watt. Pentium M's came and cleaned up compared to P4s, there was a fair bit of time there when, excluding massive power hungry desktop monsters, a beefy laptop with a Pentium M could easily beat an average desktop with a P4.

And IIRC pipeline stalls on the P4 hurt, badly.

Oh and RAMBUS, I had forgotten about RAMBUS. That also hindered the platform.