Hi, On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 6:28 AM ZB <zbigniew2...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 12:47:33AM -0500, Rugxulo wrote: > > It's amazing to me that so many people still use 486s with FreeDOS. > > For most DOS applications 486 is kind of "numbercruncher"
My 486s, back in the day, were quite slow and underpowered (Sx/25 with either 4 or 8 MB RAM and small hard drives [170 MB or 250 MB or such]). In some ways, I wish I had one again (in fully working order), just to benchmark stuff. Oh, have you seen this? I haven't tried it, but it sounds cool: * https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer > if you use Intel 486 CPU you'll get fanless "silent PC" (AMD 486 requires > fan; I mean at least these faster 100/120 MHz versions, nut sure what about > slower ones). There's many low-powered (but powerful) cpus nowadays, too. So it's not just old 800 Mhz VIA cpus or Geode or even ARM or whatever. This (Intel) Chromebook is fairly cool (compared to my much older laptop). I'm no engineer, but die shrinks in cpu processes have shown great benefit. (But there are way too many cpus, it's hard to know which is optimal for certain tasks.) > Having, say, 32 MB RAM at your disposal - what more you can need for DOS? Very naive (no offense). But I agree that you shouldn't need gigs just to crunch some numbers. I can easily use that much in DOS (and much more). Whether it's a good idea or not is a different problem. > Today typically we've got around 32 GB RAM in our machines - 1000x more - > just to move bloat, created using "modern technologies", back and forth > within that vast space Actually, I keep seeing 4 GB RAM machines for sale. I guess it's to keep costs down? I wouldn't go below that, especially for x64. Maybe that's a good thing? Maybe it helps us optimize instead of always wasting. It's not that I demand more, but having an underpowered machine is annoying. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
