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posted by martyb on Saturday December 30 2017, @06:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the perhaps-providing-prompt-prompts-prompts-perceived-performance-primacy dept.

Have you ever had that nagging sensation that your computer was slower than it used to be? Or that your brand new laptop seemed much more sluggish than an old tower PC you once had? Dan Luu, a computer engineer who has previously worked at Google and Microsoft, had the same sensation, so he did what the rest of us would not: He decided to test a whole slew of computational devices ranging from desktops built in 1977 to computers and tablets built this year. And he learned that that nagging sensation was spot on—over the last 30 years, computers have actually gotten slower in one particular way.

Not computationally speaking, of course. Modern computers are capable of complex calculations that would be impossible for the earliest processors of the personal computing age. The Apple IIe, which ended up being the “fastest” desktop/laptop computer Luu tested, is capable of performing just 0.43 million instructions per second (MIPS) with its MOS 6502 processor. The Intel i7-7700k, found in the most powerful computer Luu tested, is capable of over 27,000 MIPS.

But Luu wasn’t testing how fast a computer processes complex data sets. Luu was interested in testing how the responsiveness of computers to human interaction had changed over the last three decades, and in that case, the Apple IIe is significantly faster than any modern computer.

https://gizmodo.com/the-one-way-your-laptop-is-actually-slower-than-a-30-ye-1821608743


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by toddestan on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:50AM (1 child)

    by toddestan (4982) on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:50AM (#616074)

    I still run a P3 in my router. As you say, they are good CPUs. The early Coppermine CPUs were under 10W at full load. That was far better than many CPUs that came after it during the MHz wars for many years. Of course, there's a lot more options now, but they are still plenty fast enough for many tasks (they'll easily run circles around the Raspberry PI). The supporting hardware is pre-ROHS and mostly before the capacitor plague so it'll last a long time, other than the IDE hard drives of course.

    I had a Cyrix CPU a long time ago. They had really lousy FPU's - the one I had was a PR200+ which according to Cyrix meant it was as fast as a Pentium 200 but in reality you could forget about multitasking while playing a MP3 file (the AMD K6 was a revelation - you could play your music in the background with no noticeable impact on performance). Integer logic though was pretty fast, so it would probably do okay as a webserver - at least as far as something that old would do. The problem with trying to use one now is you're stuck on Socket 7 which means either an ancient Intel chipset or a sketchy VIA one, spotty USB support, and you probably won't have things like boot from CD so hope you have some floppies handy. Nice thing about P3-era hardware is that in many ways acts like newer hardware but slower, whereas if you go much older it's a whole different world.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Sunday December 31 2017, @01:36PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Sunday December 31 2017, @01:36PM (#616135)

    I still have an operational, and functional, backup server. It is a quad processor 200mhz Pentium Pro Compaq Proliant 5000 circia 1996. The only thing that has gone wrong is that mice got inside and smoked. I had to make some functional sacrifices -- but I don't need more than 512MB of RAM in it anyway... (Although the floppy drive and bootable CD-ROM have been vital).

    I have two fiber ethernet cards in it, each card also has two 100mb connections. I teamed the fiber and the 100mbs to an old Catalyst 5000 switch from Cisco (with the fiber module in it) and uh if I go on much longer I'll give away the secrets of my dark lair.

    It was really fast for the era, faster than data could be placed on the network until some tweaking was done on the network side. (Most modern SATA drives can at least burst that fast; SSDs can do it continuously if the therms are good, but many servers of the era were capable of performing well on 100mb networks; not 2gb teams of fiber connections. I had more bandwidth than most businesses.

    My limits seemed only really came about due to age and OS support limitations. The integrated video also was 640x480 with 16 colors... adding a non compaq video card just hosed a lot and I ended up using RDP most of the time, since that supported 256 colors...

    The pentium pro server could put data on the network at about 250MB/s if pushing to a few destinations (otherwise the etherchannel teaming has 1:1 traffic and thus limited it to 125MB/s or so) That is fast regardless; but it *was* on the same subnet because gigabit routing is still hard to do inexpensively and well... it didn't exist back then. (1.2gbps was the backplane on the catalyst, so to route with the layer 3 module, it had to leave the fiber module and go up to the routing module then out to another copper ethernet module to then hit the network segment to reach the host... so 600mbps bidirectionally when off the same subnet, but for one way transfers on the same subnet to a different module, it was easy to hit 125MB/s without even tweaking the frame sizes.. but I digress). Between the two servers I could get that 250MB/s due to the teaming, if I used different IP addresses and chose the right method of load balancing (it wasnt mac address based but I forget what I chose... been a while. I had a raid 0 of 7x4GB disks and could provide continuous data off the scsi controller, but if there was heavy non-sequential file access then of course it slowed down like you'd expect.)

    For the longest time, I used it as a proxy server and ad blocker. I had a program called atguard that became sygate that became Norton Stupid Subscription As a Service or something (and detected the server OS and refused to install at that point...) Eventually used desktops of faster CPU power and more compatibility with modern stuff replaced the core functions... but it is still fun to poke at and see how well it formed for what it was. (And as a 5U server, it had plenty of options available for it).

    It is/was faster than many modern workstations in a few ways; network traffic is of course really fast, but modern PCIe based network cards can now match it. (I doubt the system will ever see 10gb working in it due to the legacy PCI-X and EISA architecture with ISA and PCI slot support... and the OS and driver support that would be lacking...) there is no USB of any kind and I don't really want to add new things to it.

      Installing Windows 2003 R2 on hardware 10 years newer (2006) has its own set of issues and I have to use 32 bit versions on everything I've mentioned. I worked out that if everything I have in it was installed when new, it would have been a server that cost over $100k. I got it and others for free that I canabalized for parts to make it when a company I did support for went out of business and were selling them for scrap by weight without concern for the value. I offered to take some of it off their hands and they let me... (I even still got paid! One of the few dot bomb success stories I have...)

    One thing that may be of interest -- TFTP traffic used 100% of one CPU -- so, 200mhz pentium pro processor was at 100% utilization copying data via TFTP. The regular backup software was better at managing CPU use and spread it over the CPUs, but a "big" 600MB service pack could also spike utilization when copied. TFTP either was efficiently stealing all CPU resources to prevent a disruption to the UDP traffic, or it stunk and was badly optimized with coil whine. Not sure which...

    Also, I had a number of your Cyrix CPUs in workstations I had made (eventually used for gaming). The Cyrix 5x86; the 133mhz ran like a Pentium 120, the 120mhz more like a Pentium 100, and the 100mhz more like a Pentium 75/90ish... it wasn't paired with a motherboard that worked so great and so some things worked better than others (disable the integrated sound and it was fine). Descent ran fantastic, and I was able to run it at 800x600 via command line options. It was really awesome at the time.