Re: [LUG] distribution with good 386 support

Let them go, Tom. I'm sure they've served you well, so let them rest...

Perhaps I should have said 32bit machines. I do have a 50Mhz 486 but everything else is still good to go!

Even so, they're doing you no favours on power consumption.

Let's ignore the pedants and take bogomips as a reasonable guide to processing power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BogoMips

386 around 1 bogomip per mhz, so a dx33 = 33 Bogomips

Let's take your 486 and assume it's a dx-50, that's 140 Bogomips (Does this tally with yours? "dmesg|grep Bogo" to see)

Those motherboards and processors were hungry little beasts, and the dx50 ran quite hot for its time. (Not as much as the DX4-100 though - that one needed a fan AND a heatsink!)

So anyway, they're sucking away at your power bill like piggies at a sow. Probably you have older PSUs because the connectors changed, which aren't as efficient as new ones.

So... Raspberry pi. Uses negligable power, silent, reliable, adaptable, cheap to buy. How does that stack up against your DX50? Twice as fast? Three times? Four?

Nope - five times as fast at around 700 Bogomips Actually, it's more than that in many ways as the cpu has modern extensions that the older chips don't. Stuff a galvanised nail and some copper wire into a potato and you can pretty much run it for a week.

And because I'm quite pleased with the cpu upgrade on my home server last week, a ML110 with a freshly installed Xeon e3 1240 four core/eight thread cpu - here's a modern reference point:

[ 0.911780] Total of 8 processors activated (52678.11 BogoMIPS).

By all means keep an old computer as a nostalgic heirloom, but for all that is holy and good, don't try to use it for /work/!