I was astonished the other day, having been following this thread, I checked to see what processor my $300.00 e-bay computer has; it seems slow, and I thought I'd blame Intel, but imagine my surprise:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 6 model : 4 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor stepping : 4 cpu MHz : 996.487 cache size : 256 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 1985.74
Maybe a fxxxing gigaherts isn't fast enough for today's bloatware? I remember installing Slackware 3, back in the late 1990's, including X, and it was just really lean and clean and quick - really snappy response.
On a Cyrix 6X86-P150.
What happened? Howcome everything is so blasted slow that you need a processor ten to a hundred times faster than we used to have, just to type a message to a newsgroup?
(in case you're wondering, a "bogomip" is a "bogus MIPS" - it's just an ordinary timing loop that doesn't account for caching or arithmetic or anything.)
Thanks, Rich