Ask Slashdot: How Powerful Is Your Computer? (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Ask Slashdot: How Powerful Is Your Computer? (1999)

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54 pointsmgdlbp69 comments

Around then, '98 I think, I remember benchmarking the first computer I bought for myself, a Pentium II @ 350 MHz, and being floored to learn that I had just bought a desktop supercomputer! It was in the same ballpark as a single processor Cray Y-MP. I'm pretty sure some Cray Y-MPs hadn't even been retired yet at the time. From about $2.5 million to $2500 in about 10 years, for comparable hardware.

You might be right. It takes time to rewrite software. But damn, those machine cost a pretty penny to run.

Still, I would love to have one.

Indeed! The primary difference wasn't the processing power but rather the parallel capacity of the Cray to solve a completely different kind of problem.

Everything from 1997-2000 was really just magical, for lack of a better adjective.

In just a few years we saw the Intel Pentium II and Celeron (insane overclock), the AMD K6/K6-2, along with discrete 2D/3D GPUs like 3dfx Voodoo3 and Nvidia GeForce.

Thanks to low-ping affiliation, I stumbled into an early Counter-Strike clan known as "The Space Offensive" (TSO) in the Seattle area that went on to be an early participant in the competitive gaming scene as "The Speakeasy Offensive" (after corporate sponsorship). I've been hooked on the cycle of gaming/hardware loop ever since.

I still have my original Celeron 300A, made in Costa Rica, that I overclocked to 450MHz on an A-Bit BX6 2.0 mobo to play Quake 2.

I managed to snag my buddy’s old 4MB 3dfx Voodoo 1 to pair with the one I already had with the VGA pass through cable, an early form of multi-GPU.

> to play Quake 2.

In just a few years we had Quake 2 (1997) to Half-life (1998), Thief: The Dark Project and Quake 3 Arena/Unreal Tournament (1999). The year 2000 would see Dues Ex, The Sims, Diablo II, Perfect Dark, Final Fantasy IX, and Jet Set Radio... Not to mention Spyro, Red Alert 2, Paper Mario, Majora's Mask, Escape from Monkey Isand, Hitman 47...

So much amazing history in such a short period of time (let's not mention popular cinema...)

Don't forget Goldeneye!

Did that do much? I know a Voodoo 2 could be SLI'd but first I've heard about this working on a Voodoo 1.

I miss those days. I went from a P133 with 72mb RAM (bought a load of RAM cheap in '98) to a P3 500 with a TNT2 Ultra and 128mb RAM in 1999. Technology progressed at an insane rate.

Edit, I had a K6-2 500MHz in one machine around that kind of time too. Wasn't as good as the P3 personally though but was cheap and reasonable. Started me off down the path of using AMD CPUs in my builds (Duron, Athlon, Sempron) until I started moving away to Mac laptops predominantly (which coincided with finishing university and writing software for a living)!.

> Did that do much? I know a Voodoo 2 could be SLI'd but first I've heard about this working on a Voodoo 1.

IIRC the Voodoo 1 didn't have 2D capability so the pass through was to let your 2D handle that drawing.

Yeah - the Voodoo 1 was a 3D card so needed a 2D card also.

Sounded like this was 2x Voodoo 1s stacked together. I probably need more coffee this morning!

> I probably need more coffee this morning!

This is always good policy.

For some reason I have the box for the Asus CUSL2 motherboard still sitting on a shelf:

* https://www.anandtech.com/show/578

(Never bothered to throw it out.)

> In just a few years we saw the Intel Pentium II and Celeron (insane overclock), the AMD K6/K6-2, along with discrete 2D/3D GPUs like 3dfx Voodoo3 and Nvidia GeForce.

Don't forget the race to 1Ghz. Intel and AMD spent those years doubling core clock speeds every year. If you bought a system in 1996 and replaced it in 2000 the CPU might be four or more times faster. For some things that was a real geometric increase in computing power.

Everything from 1997-2000 was really just magical

That it was. I worked at a small computer animation studio around that time, and that was when a home built 'cheap' Intel machine with a GeForce cards started to first match and then surpass our high end SGI and Intergraph machines costing 5-10 as much in many workloads.

When I left almost all our animators where using 'home built' computers with Nvidia cards.

I have an SGI Indigo in my basement because at work they figured out that a PC running Windows NT had better performance, so all the SGI workstations went into the dumpster.

Some what similar for me, in the mid-2000's I was at a design agency that was moving to PHP/MySQL development. Mostly a Mac shop, but the development server was some HP thing we got from best buy for like $400. Put Red Hat on it and did nothing else, just whatever the default PHP/MySQL package was. No tuning or anything.

A little while later, Apple released the G4 xServe. We bought 2 loaded with the largest disks at the cost of several thousand dollars. But hey, OSX Server. It has PHP & MySQL and is rack mountable, etc. We also used them for file servers for all the design files.

Got all of our development sites migrated over and the performance was noticeable worse. The HP was at least 4 times faster serving up the sites. It was amazing.

Supercomputers don't so much buy speed as time.

A supercomputer is a decade or two ahead of consumer-grade hardware of the time.

And it's not just a matter of processor speed. Parallel disk I/O, total memory size, cache, and a number of other tricks factor in.

Today's cluster supercomputers are mostly just ("just") racks and racks and racks of fairly standard-grade CPUs, with high-speed switches.

GPUs have introduced their own curve into things. They work well for highly-parallelisable problems. Unfortunately, the ones that seem to have caught many people's attention are ultimately somewhat boring.

there's a thread on slashdot IIRC where a guy explains that a good old cray, due to its massive cache and bandwidth, can crunch number matrices at massive "speed". I forgot the details but basically each cycle the processor could recompute a whole 1MB or 8MB matrix, and steadily so. Whereas a pentium4/core cpu, clocked way higher and more "modern" can only process that amount of data for a small time before all caches are filled and performance plummets.

People compare supercomputers to general purpose computers and forget things like this - the supercomputer and the program it ran were often designed in parallel to do a particular thing very very fast.

Yeah goals impacts architecture. But it's interesting to see that computing systems have parameters and structures. Cycle clock, memory, cache .. they don't paint the whole picture. The constant massive data crunching of a Cray is not visible on frequency.

That said, I'm curious about what a 2020 iphone can do, even in HPC numerical contexts..

At work in 1997 they bought a rack full of IRIX graphics processing which costs 000,000s to do a specific task

When I started in 2003 the same task was performed on a 2U machine costing in the region of 2k.

I remember during the 90s, whenever I or anyone I knew got a new machine, it would be noticeably faster than previous machines. Clock speeds rocketed during the era, and you could actually tell just from waiting for Windows to start.

Graphics cards did something similar towards the end of the decade, each time a friend got a new one it was a like a whole new world.

Since any one person would still be hanging on to their machine for a few years, you could really feel the slowdown when you went back home.

It wasn’t just that things got faster quickly. Hardware would rapidly become too old to run modern software. My first pc was a 386 33 mhz with 8 mb ram around 1993, and by 1998 software had passed it by to the point where I literally had no use for it except hand it down as a legacy gaming computer to my younger sister. I remember being forced to use 5 year old 386 computer lab pc’s at uni in 1997 and them being too slow to do our programming assignments on.

Pc’s also cost way more back then. That 386 was bottom spec and it was still 1700 euro in 2022 money. Being into computers was an expensive hobby.

IBM-compatible PC's were expensive prior to the late-1990s, but there were plenty of lower-cost competitors in the home computer market.

I call today's situation "more's law." Clock speeds and single core performance are largely stagnant but the horizontal growth is still amazing.

Look at the original M1 in the MacBook Air vs. the M1 Ultra or whatever they call that 48-64 core beast. Single core is about the same. If your load is not parallelizable the M1 MacBook Air will do it about as fast as the new Mac Studio.

In the x64 world they continue to squeeze more instruction level parallelism out and push the clock rates slightly higher but those come at the cost of higher power consumption. It's pretty stagnant there too unless you are willing to invest in a refrigerated liquid cooling system and overclocking capable hardware.

But on multi-threaded loads the performance is still going up the way single core speeds were from 1995 until 2005. That's because a mixture of smaller process nodes, larger dies, better memory bandwidth, and better core interconnect fabrics are letting the equivalent of a whole data center be crammed into a single package.

I think that is going to keep going for a while. We will probably see 256 cores on a desktop machine within 10 years and rack mount servers with 1024 cores in a single 1U case.

Ah, our good friend, Amdahl's law. Algorithms will need to be more than 99% parallelizable in order to gain any more performance out of that 256 core chip than a 128 core one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

To this day I cherish the memory when a friend and I got to one of the local computer shops and bought 2 identical PII-350s and, as high school students buying with a random mix of 10s, 20s and the occasional 50 DM bill and the shopkeeper lamenting the students and their small bills on the one hand and being happy to accept this sale on the other hand of course.

I like to play a mental game where I try to figure out the year where a current latest Raspberry Pi is equivalent to the total world computing power. Most of the time I fall asleep before I get very far! ;)

Example: The original Cray-1 could process 160MFLOPS, while a Pi Zero 2 can process 5.1GFLOPS. (via http://www.clustered-pi.com/ ) The Cray-1 was released in 1975 with over 100 sold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1 -- So the Pi Zero 2 was roughly 300 times more powerful than a Cray-1, and was roughly equivalent to the world's computing power in 1975.

I leave it up to the reader to work out other comparisons :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders... can be useful to help you figure out the equivalent computing power of various devices.

If you see the stuff Feynmann had to work with when creating the first atomic bomb, just about anything is more powerfull.

I always wonder if the CPU used to check if I push the power button on my Senseo coffee maker should be considered technology capable of making a nuclear bomb .

This is a little misleading due to latency issues etc.

I like trying to figure out when you would be better off with say 250 Cray-1’s vs the latest Raspberry Pi.

I think you're making the same mistake as many other modern benchmarks do: GPU compute != general purpose compute.

A Pi Zero 2 is easily multiple times faster than a Cray 1, but not 300 times, except for certain very specific workloads.

For general code that does lots of math but isn't GPU accelerated, I bet the difference in performance is significantly smaller.

I had a ThinkPad 380ED I think.

I remember it had a 3GB hard drive, and I'm pretty sure it had both a floppy disk drive and a CD drive -- in a laptop! 166MHz CPU, probably 16MB RAM or something hilarious like that.

And it was just this delightful black block, no curves, no ridges or go faster stripes, it was just this smooth black cuboid. It always felt like it was rugged enough to survive a natural disaster, and yet it had this sublime keyboard and a nice screen for the time.

I loved that laptop very much.

I miss Windows 98 actually, sure it was bad, but the way it looked and felt was just terrific. No nonsense, and yet it had character. It's like someone was saying yesterday about Windows 2000 being the peak, I think they're right. It was robust and simple, it was easy on the eyes, and it wasn't heavy on resources, it was just a decent Windows OS.

XP and 7 are both hailed as good Windows OSs too, but I found myself changing both to look like Windows 2000, always switching off all the themes etc. Sure wish Windows 10/11 still had classic theme (yes, I know you can download a third-party app to bring it back, not the point though is it)

Why on earth the article linked to archive when the original is still up? https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how...

Is this another one of those "the old comments / commenters were better" nonsense?

Maybe the submitter prefers a functioning back button that doesn’t spam you when you try to leave.

I haven't visited /. in ages. I didn't know how far it had fallen and am shocked it still gets traffic, given this back button behavior. It is indeed a good reason to never post direct links.

Slashdot got sold to Dice a decade ago and went downhill from there. After their absolutely horrible redesign, which I guess they shelved because the site looks as I remember it, the community sort of split into two with plenty people moving over to https://soylentnews.org/

Here's the first SoylentNews submission from 2014: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=1

Disclaimer: I'm just (barely) remembering stuff here. No idea what happened to either site past 2014.

What 'back button behavior' are we talking about... noticed nothing when just clicking through a few articles and back, and then back out of slashdot completely.

Though it might have been blocked by ublock-origin or some other addon without noticiing it.

When it functions as intended, the site hijacks the back button to offer you a series of “articles” to read “before you go.”

I’m currently viewing on Safari on iOS through a firewall with a spam deny list. Whether the ad hits my deny list or not, the only way to go back from the site is to hold the back button and manually select a different page.

On mobile Safari, /. "traps" you on their site by causing the back button/back swipe gesture to return you back to their site. I am not sure exactly how -- haven't looked at the code.

Three comments now pointing this out. I guess I'm still kind of new here, so I didn't know submitting the exact canonical URL was so valued. The main reason was that I noticed that the comments had been shuffled in a redesign, making the original threads harder to read (other reply [0]).

I do see now how unnecessary Wayback links make it harder to find previous/dupe submissions. Though, Wayback links that are out of necessity aren't uncommon on HN; another case for more advanced URL deduping?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30613493

well, it's not so much that I was frowning upon it, it's more that I was genuinely curious. It seemed like an odd thing to do.

My work PC was a Pentium 166Mhz overclocked to 225 Mhz (bus cranked up from 33 to 45Mhz) with 64 MB of RAM, a Matrox Mystique 4MB, two 1.2 GB disks and a SCSI 2x CD burner running Windows 98SE.

However my other work machine was an SGI O2 :) R5000 200Mhz 256 MB and 4GB disk (and the video IO card).

Back then all the PCs in the company had PUBLIC IP V4 ADDRESSES. Imagine that. And no firewall whatsoever.

Better linking to the live canonical URL instead:

https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how...

I was very impressed when I saw that Slashdot is one of few sites to have maintained redirects from all the way back (well, almost; they didn't include the CGI links from 1998! [0]). But I thought it'd be more interesting to see how it all looked back then, both with the old site design and because the comment sort changed when they added the display controls around late 2001, which shuffled comments from old stories and broke up threads that were mostly in sequence before.

Trivia: This story predates the meta-moderation system (introduced around 1999-09; story from 1999-02). Notable also that the comment sort today remains unchanged from 2001.

[0] http://slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=427

Edit: I wondered about 'late 2001' and looked into it a bit. The 9/11 traffic spike was very close (CmdrTaco on how they handled it [1]), but Wayback shows the threshold control was present already in August.

[1] https://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/13/154222.shtml

-99 I bought a computer for the first time with my own money from the summer job i had back then. Pentium 2, Nvidia Riva TNT2, some Sound Blaster, CD-R drive (2x speed, we burnt so many CDs with that) and I think 128MB RAM, but can't remember anymore. No idea what the other components were. I think that all in all it costed about 10 000 Finnish Markka, which would be around 2300 euros in today's money (so adjusted for inflation).

At that point I had just upgraded our Pentium 166 with a Voodoo2 and could finally play Quake 2 in glorious accelerated 800x600 3D. That machine started life as a Micron 486 DX2 66MHz that was upgraded to a Pentium Overdrive which was then upgraded with a Tyan Tomcat III with a Pentium 166. RAM was 32 MB of EDO and video card was an ATI 3d Pro turbo with 4MB VRAM (expandable to 8MB and had built in TV output) Storage was a mix of the 486's original 540MB disk and a 1 GB disk I bought at a computer fair. That was the first gigabyte disk I owned and was ecstatic that I could copy a whole CD's worth of data to my disk.

I still have all of the above mentioned parts, save for the hard disks, including the pulled 486 chip. I had The Tyan booting OpenBSD and 9front last year but it had a lot of stability issues. Unsure if its age related or software.

Wonder if computer fairs are still a thing. Got fond memories of buying bits at them.

I do not recall my machine in '99. But I suspect it was close to my '98 build. I do recall upgrading the dual Pentium II CPUs to Pentium IIIs around late '99 or early 2000.

My personal computer/workstation was a dual 933Mhz Pentium II CPUs on a Tyan Tiger S1834D motherboard, a Creative Labs Nvidia TNT and a Creative Labs GeForce 2 GTS 32MB AGP, a Mylex array controller, 512MB of 133Mhz SDRAM DIMMs, 17x 2GB WD2170W HDDs, and a few 120GB EIDE HDDs, and dual 21" Viewsonic Professional CRT monitors.

By the side of my desk was a Silicon Graphics Crimson desk side, and I also had a purple Indigo 2 with the tricked out GPU and capture card and a 20" granite monitor, mouse & keyboard, though by then, those Silicon Graphics machines were getting long in the tooth.

Had something like a Pentium 2 300mhz with mmx if I'm not mistaken, and a voodoo 2. Couple of gigs of disk space and iunno how much ram. I remember we later put in 256mb of ram and made it into our firewall running Debian with iptables where it sat until 2011~.

> How soon will I be able to buy a machine more powerful than the world's computing power when I was born?

An AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is 2.3M MIPS. If you were born prior to ~1977, you are currently able to do this, according to https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/world-computing-power...

If born after, you still can but you need a lot more money.

This is interesting because "Ask Slashdot" at the head of the title is clearly an antecedent to "Ask HN". I always wondered where that came from—I remember when people started posting "Ask HN" shortly after HN was born, and I remember how it struck me as a bit of an odd convention.

Are there instances of "Ask $community" from before Slashdot?

The machine I had in 1999 I had bought in 1996 and it had a Pentium 166MMX with 64MB of RAM.

That is about the same as the wireless router I'm using at the moment that is the size of a flash drive and costs about US$20 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/).

In 1999, my dad bought a surplus PC from an office move. A pentium 166, 24 MB RAM, 15" CRT, and eventually updated to Windows 98. The new CDROM drive broke a few days after, and it took months for the neighbor to get a replacement from whatever flaky family member he got it from. In 1999, a useful PC had to have a CDROM drive, so having it out for months felt like forever. We could have gone to Best Buy or something to get another, but my parents were (and still are) such cheapskates.

The thing stopped booting in 2001, replaced by a 1.2GHz duron with Win 2000.

About 8 years ago, I built a retro PC. I targeted 2000, and got a P3 600, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 GTS, 17" CRT, and Win 98. Ball mouse. I turn it on every few months to feel nostalgic. For some reason, I still had the same sound card from that 166 (some Yamaha XG card), so I put it in there, and it sounds so right!

There is something about the MIDI voices (samples? there's a word at the tip of my tongue here) that were built into the cards from back when that snaps me back 20+ years.

> (samples? there's a word at the tip of my tongue here)

Synth? Synthesis?

I'm sure that it's a lost art of hearing the sound of one synth over another and identifying it exactly. Hardware ones always sounded much better to me.

After some Googling, soundfonts was the word, which I suppose would be synthesized into sound.

Ah 1999… my first company made more than we knew what to do with so we had the latest and the greatest all the time. Almost everything ran Linux; we had one NT machine to migrate a company ‘s telco backend off Windows (which gave them a lot of downtime and for them that was literally losing money every missed minute) to AIX (which ran remotely).

I had the legendary Celeron 300A and a 3DFX Voodoo2. The 300A was easily overclockable to 450Mhz. I wish I still had it.

Nice to see that little has changed! :D

"I brake for unix.boys, Windows just breaks."

ahaha love this <3

Pentium II 300 with 64MB. Riva 128 graphics card. Ran BeOS and Linux on it. I think I got my first DSL line (256 kbps SDSL) that year or the next. Magical.

I believe the correct spelling is 'powerfull'.

You are mistaken: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/powerfull

It's just an in-joke, it was a common misspelling on slashdot.

all words with this suffix are spelled -ful : powerful, colorful, truthful, ...

I see inside joke. Well, I did read /. at the time.

My work computer was a sun ultra 60 then. Felt godly. Then it was replaced with a windows 2000 pentium 3 box which was notably a lot faster.

what was wrong with the actual URL? no web archive needed

http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/02/12/1429236.shtml

From the comments, is this early bitcoin mining?

>It's even better when you (with permission) install it on all the computers at work and put in on 'invisible' mode. If you want to get technical it's cracking the code for a PRESET quote in a RC5-64 encoded contest message, and if you find the correct key then you get $1000 and x2 if you're not associated with a group.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com