[mythtv-users] How MANY backend threads!?!?!? ***** AUTO-REPLY *****

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Thu Oct 14 01:13:13 UTC 2010


On Wednesday, October 13, 2010 06:53:30 pm Greg Oliver wrote:

> > 
> > The advances of the ARM-based "Plug" machines will continue I'm sure,
> > look what we did with the venerable old NSLU2, lots of very capable PBXs
> > run on them, as well as video capture machines, and today's Plugs very
> > much outperform the 266Mhz. (or even 133) ARM in the slug.
> 
> Yes, and MHz for MHz, it is not fair to even put the same equipment
> side by side (today and 10 years ago)..  There are so many more
> integrated instruction sets on today's stuff, it would be unfair to
> compare them..  Not to even mention power draw  :)

True.

But it's surprising how much software today (not talking about Myth specifically) does not use anything beyond decades-old 
instructions, mostly for compatibility reasons. That's one reason I like Gentoo, you can be sure your system is compiled 
to take best advantage of your hardware.

That is starting to change, especially with the multi-core CPUs becoming more common, the later instructions are being 
used more (not that they depend on multi-core, but since a lot of stuff is being re-written to take advantage of multiple 
threads more, some other updates are happening as well). I'm starting to see more stuff come in both i386 and i686 
versions.

You can't even make a comparison between Intel and AMD CPUs on a Mhz. for Mhz. basis, at last the "clock speed wars" seem 
to be over, but comparing an ARM and an Intel or AMD core is almost meaningless, especially with things like the NSLU2 
which doesn't even have a floating point unit.

I recall paying over $100  for an 8087 chip back in the mid-80s. Then there were the "SX" lines of 486 chips which were 
w/o FP co-processors. Just a way for Intel to sell 486s with bad silicon.

I still have an original Pentium with the fdiv bug, anyone want it? I see even modern kernels still check for that bug.



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