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by Traubenfuchs 302 days ago
> 80W TDP as a desktop terminal would be an insane waste of energy when that's less capable than some no-name Android table with a 5W ARM SoC which can even paly 1080p Youtube while the Pentium 4 cannot

Insane how far hardware got: the pentium 4 engineers probably felt like the smartest people alive and now a pentium 4 looks almost as ridiculous and outdated to us as vacuum tube computers.
2 comments
arcade79 302 days ago
What I find truly insane is how we're "wasting" the hardware.

I ran a mailserver for thousands of people on a 486 DX 33Mhz. It had smtp, pop3 and imap. It was more than powerful enough to handle it with ease.

I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.

These days I have a a machine from 2018 or 2019, which I upgraded to 32G of RAM and I added an NVME drive in addition to the spinning rust earlier this year.. because firefox got (extremely, more than a minute to start the browser) sluggish due to an HDD instead of NVME.

Now, it's obvious that an NVME drive is superior, but it surprises me how incredibly lackadaisical we've gotten with resource usage. It surprises me how little "extra" we get, except ads that requires more and more resources. Sure, we've got higher resolution photos, higher resolution videos, and now AI will require vast resources (which of course is cool). At the same time, we don't get that much more utility out of our computers.

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FirmwareBurner 302 days ago
>What I find truly insane is how we're "wasting" the hardware.

Only if you ignore the business economic realities of the world we live in. Unless you work at hyperscaleres of MS/google/meta where every fraction of percent optimization save millions of dollars, nobody is pays SW engineers to optimize SW for old consumer devices because it's money wasted you won't recoup so you offload it on the customer to buy better HW. Rinse and repeat.

>I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.

Why isn't it supremely capable anymore? It will still be just as capable if you run the same software from 1999 on it. Or do you expect to run 2025 SW on it?

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gary_0 302 days ago
Chips that old would be on a ~100nm process node, which is ancient. Anything using Flintstone transistors like those isn't going to hold up.

> the pentium 4 engineers probably felt like the smartest people alive

The P4's NetBurst architecture had some very serious issues, so that might not be true. NetBurst assumed that 10GHz clock speeds would soon be a thing, and some of the engineers back then might have had enough insight to guess that this approach was based on an oversimplified view of semiconductor industry trends. The design took a lot of stupid risks, such as the ridiculously long instruction pipeline, and they were always unlikely to pay off.

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