> A few weeks ago, after growing tired of my mother worrying about her
> 486DX2-66 machine blowing up on 1/1/00, I gave in and let her have my
> P120 machine (with a Y2K complient bios) in exchange for her 486
> machine. I now have this 486 machine doing the factoring that was
> being done by the P120. Generally, it is taking almost two weeks per
> exponent.
The 486 really isn't as good at doing those types of calculations, but
still...
> Therefore, my question is even with this two week time, is the 486
> machine doing "useful work" for GIMPS, or is it merely heating up the
> CPU? I ask this because in a couple or three weeks I may have access
> to a quantity (30 to 75) of 486DX-50 machines. If these machines can
> contribute useful work to GIMPS, I will happily give them each a mouthful
> of exponents to factor :-)
I'd say most definitely. Factoring is a good workout for a 486, but
considering that current factoring assignments are approaching 10M, it will
still be quite some time before the LL tests get up that far, so the fact
that it takes a 486 a couple weeks just to trial factor those numbers is of
little consequence.
It does seem lopsided that your 486 takes 2 weeks to do what one of those
beastly PIII-550's can do in 12 hours (just a guess), but that's still 12
hours less, and that beastly CPU can do a lot more LL iterations in that
time, so you'd still be contributing to the effort.
You could also do something more conducive to the 486 environment...I don't
know - is ECM good work for a 486?
Aaron
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