Hi, On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 8:57 AM Liam Proven <lpro...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Tue, 7 Mar 2023 at 14:50, Bret Johnson <bretj...@juno.com> wrote: > > > The problem is, the CPU's _themselves_ really haven't gotten a whole lot > > faster than they were in the 386 days. > > Drastic oversimplification to the point of not being true, accurate or > representative.
I'm not sure what he meant there (N.B. not a big deal) nor whether he meant a literal 386. Because the 486 was twice as fast as the 386 at the same clock speed. (The fastest 386 instruction was 2 cycles.) Was he comparing it to RISC design? The Pentium Pro was atrocious at 16-bit code, focusing on 32-bit. And early Pentium 4 models were slower than fast Pentium 3s! In particular, the Pentium 4 was redesigned to be able to scale up to 10 Ghz, but my the time the Pentium-D (3-ish Ghz) came out, it used too much power, so they scrapped it and went back to the Pentium-M (IIRC, the mobile Pentium 3 with SSE2) for the future Core 2 cpus (2006). Even compared to 2004, a lot has improved in cpus, so yes they are overall much faster. * https://www.phoronix.com/news/2004-CPU-3990X-Plus-FX-9590 > I'd say Koomey's Law replaced Moore's Law circa 2007-2008, when the > x86 industry went through the multicore transition. From ~1975 to > ~2005: CPU bandwidth approximately doubled every ~1½ years. Since > ~2005: bandwidth increases ~10% every 1½ years. Wikipedia says "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years." This does not strictly mean performance improvements, but most people interpret it thus anyways. Either way, I've enjoyed FreeDOS (in one form or another) on whatever machine I could find. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
