11/9 Do the 386 and 486 versions of SETI@home work on 386 or 486SX PCs
without a 387 or 487SX?
\_ "Back in the day", you had to either get a math co-proc or the
software had to be written to use software emulation which meant
it would run at 1/10th the speed or so for things that normally
required a math co-proc. What's the point of grinding out a unit
per 2 months anyway? By the time you get your unit in, they'll
have already given up on your client/unit pair. As far as seti
goes, it depends totally on how they wrote it. Try it.
\_ I know it depends on how they wrote it, or more likely, what
compiler switches they passed to the compiler. But since I
don't have a 386/486SX PC, I can't try it out myself.
\_ Then why do you care?
\_ Okay, I'm just curious.
\_ Surely you've got better things to do than provide horribly
energy-inefficient computing power to SETI with negligible
results.
\_ Hey, at least it's not a 8088 or a Z80.
\_ It was either inefficient cycles going to SETI or wasted idle
cycles. Which one is worse?
\_ It was either inefficient cycles going to SETI, or wasted cycles
running idle loop or drawing flying toasters. Which one is
worse?
\_ Turn the fucking thing off, duh. Just because it still
works doesn't mean it should be on.
\_ Dude, chill. It seems unlikely that the wasted power
from an old machine is going to matter all that much
in the grand scheme of things. Try decaf next time....
\_ What about the wasted idle cycles when you're typing in
your source code, or your compiler is reading a file from
the hard disk or over the network, or you're downloading
something from the web, or your debugger is waiting for
the target machine to hit a breakpoint? I power on my
PC at work 8 or 9 hours a day, and at the end of the day
I usually find that only 10% of the CPU cycles went to
the ocmpilers/browser/OS etc, whereas the other 90% is
idle cycles which I use to run SETI@home. |
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