14 Oct
2012
14 Oct
'12
5:50 p.m.
On 14 October 2012 21:56, Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> wrote:
On Sun, 14 Oct 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
Well, I don't know about SSE2, but requiring certain features, yes,
certainly. Last year, Debian stopped offering a kernel for my
Thinkpad's Pentium-M & I had to revert to the 486-optimised kernel.
This year, Ubuntu dropped support for x86-32 CPUs without PAE - so
again, ordinary 32-bit Ubuntu will no longer boot on my Thinkpad. I
had to use the minimal-install CD to install a barebones system and
then apt-get in the Unity desktop off the net. It worked, but slowly;
I replaced it with Lubuntu, which works much better, but I understand
that as of 12.10 (next week!) evne Lubuntu will lost the non-PAE
kernel as the upstream repositories will no longer contain it.
It's not just an x86 problem, either; the reason that Ubuntu won't run
on the Raspberry Pi is that it dropped support for ARM7 back in 2009.
(IIRC.)
Software bloat continues to be a serious problem.
The thing is, chips
stopped getting massively faster about 5-6y ago now. Things doubled every
18mth up to 2005 or so, then it was 50% for the next generation, then 25%
for the one after that, then ~12% for, say, 2nd-gen Core i5/7 over the 1st
gen, and <10% for 3rd gen over 2nd.
All we're getting is more and more cores and smaller and more
electricity-efficient chips.
The programmers have not caught on to this yet.
The other issue I've begun to notice are companies building their software
so that it won't function unless the processor has the SSE2 instruction set.
With Intel CPUs this rules out anything pre- Pentium 4, including all the
otherwise perfectly usable Pentium M, III, II, and Socket 7 based systems.
This also prevents the use of AMD chips such as the Athlon, Athlon XP, any
of the K6, etc (anything pre-Athlon 64). One of the worst offenders that I discovered is the
Adobe Flash plugin. They
"can't reproduce the issue" because they _won't_ test with anything
older
than a Core Duo. It is just plain pitiful.
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3155858
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3154276
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3158108
That is just sad.
...and I happen to like the Pentium III (the Tualatin
-S variants in
particular) and Pentium M.
Concur. Fine chips. Much better than the P4 that succeeded them.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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