[GTALUG] pigs with wings

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 04:10:57PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I'm going to do the unthinkable: throw out a working notebook tomorrow.
> 
> An NEC Versa SX from 1999.
> Running Fedora Core 1.
> Pentium 2 @ 233MHz
> 256M of RAM
> 10G HDD [an upgrade from something considerably smaller]
> Video: Trident Cyber 9388
> Screen: 1024x768.
> No built-in networking (that's what PCcards are for).
> Swappable bay for CD writer and floppy drive (I have both).
> Came with a Windows NT 3.5 license (if I remember correctly).
> but with Win98 installed.
> 
> The video is a problem: it is only "TrueColor": 16 bits/pixel. The X 
> driver has a long-standing bug where at each power-on the video might be 
> in a state where the colours are screwed up.  The only cure is to power 
> cycle.  The fundamental problem is that X doesn't know how to fully 
> initialize the device.  Kind of 50/50, if I remember correctly.
> 
> I'm playing with it now.  The screen is bright and clear.  I quite like 
> the feel of the keyboard.  There is a constant fan noise.
> 
> The machine was quite nice for its day but things are mostly better 
> now.  I bought this 17 years ago, lets say 8 doublings by Moore's law.
> Current nice notebooks vs this:
> 
> RAM: 16G (2^6 better)

Well that's hardly high end by todays standards, although probably still
higher than typical.

> SSD/HDD: 256G vs 10G (2^5 more capacity but a lot faster)
> HDD/HDD: 2T vs 3.2G (2^10 more capacity and a bit faster)

Might be more fair to compare the 10G against the 2T and the 3.2G against
the 256G.

> screen: 3200x1800 vs 1024x768 (2^3 better)
> CPU: 2.4GHz vs 233MHz (2^3 faster clock but more instructions/second too)

But how many cores and how much cache?  That's probably where the
transistors have gone.  After all 4 cores are common, so that alone is 2^2
extra, and a modern 2.4GHz is probably more than 2^4 times the performance
of the 233 Pentium, so I would say a mid range quad core these days is
easily more than 2^6 times the top of the line Pentium ever made.
Not 2^8, but still.

> So: Growth is impressive but Moore's law doesn't seem to have applied.

Well, it only applies to transistor density, not performance.

-- 
Len Sorensen