[Retric]

Even modern cellphone chips a far more than 20x the speed of a 100Mhz 486 outside of extremely pathological workloads. At minimum we’re still talking 64 Bit chips.

However, IMO simply thinking in terms of actual chips that existed isn’t that interesting. What would computing look like if the PIII was a 12 CPU at 500 MHz. That’s a little closer to 5% of modern chips and something nobody worked with.

Alternatively what the 486 era would have looked like with gigabytes of RAM and an SSD?

[mywittyname]

I can't buy into the idea of 486s but also SSDs. Why doesn't the speed limitation of CPUs extend to controllers, busses, SoC, transistor sizes, etc? If the 2GHZ CPU is now 10Mhz, then presumably the memory bus is no longer 100Mhz, but 5Mhz.

[Retric]

I think the basic assumption is some kind of change to the laws of physics and thus transistor frequency scaling otherwise it’s effectively just asking what it was like in the past. So dropping 6GHz 64 bit chips to 300 MHz doesn’t imply everything else is the same and where just using 32bit PII era hardware.

Similarly rather than NVMe 2TB SSD’s at 6000 MB/s we could have 2TB SSD’s at 300 MB/s. Which then opens the door for even more extreme differences.

If the “PIII was a 12 ^core^ CPU at 500 MHz” that’s quote odd by historic standards.