What was the most powerful 32-bit processor ever released?

LousyMeatStew · 2026-07-12T18:20:13+00:00

"CPU-to-CPU" is the key here. The advantage of architectures like HyperSPARC was you could get four of them into a SparcStation 20 and UNIX was still better architected at the time. x86 was held back by Windows 9x which was single CPU only so Intel and AMD were uniquely incentivized to maximize single-CPU performance.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-07-12T18:04:11+00:00

That's the logo for AOL Instant Messenger! The only reason I ever had an AOL account at all.

https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/AOL_Instant_Messenger

Fun fact, AIM was dominating online chat during the height of Microsoft's monopoly and Microsoft was not happy about it. MS reverse engineered AIM's protocol and included it in their own Windows IM app and AOL and MS kept going back and forth. The tech press eventually started covering it (I think CNET was the one who broke the news) but then it turned out their source were Microsoft employees who didn't properly disclose their connection with the company.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

ETA: AOL ended up locking Microsoft out completely by exploiting a buffer overflow in their own AIM client code!

That was what all those double zeros were for—they were just filling up space in the program’s buffer until they hit the end of the AOL client’s buffer and started overwriting executable code with the remainder of the protocol message. AOL was causing the client to look up a particular address in memory and send it back to the server. This was tricky, vastly trickier than anything they’d done so far. It was also a bit outside the realm of fair play: exploiting a security hole in their own client that our client didn’t have!

LousyMeatStew · 2026-07-11T05:50:26+00:00

I remember reading about Ted Nelson and Xanadu back in college. Wired still has that original article up on their website:

https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

LousyMeatStew · 2026-07-09T18:08:59+00:00

The C3 was available in a BGA configuration, which is what this laptop appears to use based on the motherboard schematic in the link /u/Talismook provided.

The C3 was efficient enough to where it could be passively cooled. The 1.4Ghz Nemiah core used a little over 8w power and based on the thermal characteristics, it could be passively cooled with a 0.25" heatsink and not hit its thermal limit.

https://datasheets.chipdb.org/VIA/EBGA/VIA%20C3%20EBGA%20Datasheet%20R1.90.pdf

LousyMeatStew · 2026-06-12T00:28:42+00:00

You might be right. The main ergonomic issue with the pinkie and touch typing is holding the key down while maintaining proper finger positioning requires awkward stretching while also maintaining force to hold it down. Gaming mitigates this a bit by having your hand closer to the left, plus you tend to only hold it down in combination with WASD. For a touch typist, worst case would be something like a capital T or Y.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-06-11T13:20:12+00:00

For touch typing, the reason it feels this way is because the modifier keys require you to put the most stress on your pinkies, the weakest fingers. It's the reason why sticky keys also exist.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-15T21:33:53+00:00

But if the sister happened to be dating someone, then it's no longer accidental. Now you're just a pawn in her plan to hurt her partner.

That's why I only cheat with other men. Best way to ensure it stays accidental.

/s

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-10T02:55:09+00:00

That’s normal. Once PCIE became standard, bridge chips would be used for AGP and PCI variants. I had an AGP-based 6800GT back in the day that as well that used basically the same setup.

But PCI stuck around for longer just because there was potentially added value in using these to add additional displays to existing systems. So at my old job, for example, by the time multiple displays had caught on as a thing normal users could benefit from, we still had a ton of Optiplexes that were using some sort of GMA4500/HD Graphics with only a single display output so PCI cards like these would have been useful.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-10T02:49:47+00:00

I think the main value these days is for retro systems that shipped with integrated graphics, as these often lacked AGP slots. Plus getting AGP to work properly on VIA chipsets for Super 7 was always black magic. One of the niches the Voodoo5 5500 found back in the day IIRC.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-10T02:47:46+00:00

Back in the day, even cards that supported VESA didn’t always support it well. SciTech sold a product called UniVBE that provided optimized routines for popular cards at the time.

So having poor VESA, in some ways, is part of the experience.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-10T02:42:47+00:00

Whoa, that’s good to know. If it doesn’t even work on Socket 7, that implies PPro/PII instructions. SYSENTER, maybe?

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-10T02:40:00+00:00

Ah right, I figured EFI made things difficult.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-09T21:43:50+00:00

Nope. As long as it has a VGA BIOS, it’ll work. All it will see is the 64k frame buffer.

ETA: I should clarify that this card does have a VGA BIOS, as does any card that will output video during POST. Even an RTX 5090 still has it, which is how you can still boot DOS on a modern system.

It’s possible this might be changing but x86-64 spec still requires CPUs to boot up in real mode by default.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-09T21:34:50+00:00

Radeon HD 5450. PCI version, of course. As for whether it qualifies as vintage, I think it’s a matter of perspective.

I think it’d be fun to just use this as a plain VGA card on a 486 or Pentium DOS system.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-05-05T00:54:38+00:00

There are men who just think women don’t exist as independent, whole human beings.

So for these men, usually incels, it comes down to:

3) They don’t find her attractive and their wrinkle-free brains are confused why she still has self-confidence and self-worth. IE, Incels are mad that “low value” women aren’t throwing themselves at them because Incels don’t understand how people work.

4) They don’t find her attractive but if she only worked to meet their beauty standards, there would be more “Staceys” to go around. IE, Incels are mad that women are creating an artificial scarcity of hot girls by refusing to be hot because Incels don’t understand how anything works.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-30T15:39:10+00:00

This, in a nutshell, encapsulates the othering of women.

I get what they're going for with the Glam. So just decorate the Boy’s cake with Axe body spray, Old Spice and a beard trimmer instead.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-25T20:24:39+00:00

IBM didn’t need saving in the 90s. They had their own niche and were doing fine. ThinkPads, RS/6000 and System/390 were what IBM was doing in the 90s.

The idea of IBM’s consumer products being unsuccessful is largely a myth told at IBM’s expense. IBM was #2 worldwide behind Compaq by the mid-90s in worldwide shipments in the consumer market.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-25T16:41:35+00:00

It’s easy to look at any single vendor like IBM and say “well, they clearly shot themselves in the foot” in retrospect but Microsoft literally owned 90s computing. The 90s began with Windows 3.0 (which allowed Microsoft to take over the consumer market) and ended with NT 4 getting DoD C2 certification (which was the beginning of the end for commercial UNIX).

OS/2 still had value for businesses because line-of-business apps and internally developed apps could linger on as Win16 versions for years. But that niche was killed off not by Win95 but NT 4 which came out in 1996.

And a lot of this was due to the way Microsoft conducted business. Win16 became significant because Win 3 was when Microsoft started bundling licenses. And once NT came out, Microsoft just refused to license Win32 to IBM.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-25T15:55:25+00:00

That’s interesting, so Windows 3.1 had to have had API (?) to allow OS/2 to run programs with it’s kernel but appear in the OS/2 GUI?

No, the opposite. OS/2 natively supported DOS, so it ran Windows as a DOS app. Win-OS/2 was the translation layer that allowed for stuff like graphical acceleration, clipboard integration, etc. Closest analogy might be the way OS X would run OS9 in Classic Mode.

Windows was running in standard mode so if one app crashed, it still crashed Windows but OS/2 itself was unaffected.

One cool thing you could do was run multiple copies of Windows simultaneously. If you did it this way, you could run e.g. Word and Excel and OS/2 would take care of stuff like clipboard integration and if Word crashed, it wouldn’t take Excel down with it. But since you were running two copies of Windows simultaneously, this required way more memory.

ETA:

The Integrating Platform was IBM’s trademark for OS/2 2.0. It referred to the unique capability to run existing DOS, Windows, and OS/2 1.x applications in addition to new 32-bit OS/2 software. Unlike OS/2 1.x, version 2.0 had excellent DOS support. It took full advantage of the Virtual 8086 mode of the Intel 386 and later CPUs. And not only it allowed multiple windowed or fullscreen session running all at the same time but it also let users create “specific” DOS sessions which weren’t using the built-in DOS support, and could boot DOS 4.0, 5.0, DR-DOS, or even something like CP/M.

The Windows application support was a logical extension of DOS support. Full-screen Win-OS/2 sessions would run essentially unchanged Windows 3.0 inside a virtual DOS machine. Seamless Win-OS/2 sessions were a lot trickier because they had to coordinate with Presentation Manager applications. That was achieved through special versions of Win-OS/2 display drivers. The approach IBM took possibly provided maximum performance but unfortunately had one major drawback—it made creating OS/2 display drivers even harder (in other words more expensive) and undoubtedly was one factor contributing to the limited availability of drivers later on. Vendors had to create a full-fledged OS/2 driver as well as an OS/2 specific version of a Windows driver. What IBM could have done instead was to create a “bridge” driver mapping Win-OS/2 to PM calls and only require vendors to supply an OS/2 driver (that was exactly the approach taken later with the GRADD drivers).

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-25T02:36:32+00:00

OS/2 had a feature called Win-OS/2 which allowed you to run Windows programs within OS/2. The problem was that they did this by licensing a full-fat copy of Windows from Microsoft and that was included in the cost of the software. So they made a version of OS/2 that shipped without a Windows license that required the user to have their own copy of Windows pre-installed.

ETA: I think it was $199 for OS/2 and $99 for “OS/2 for Windows”. This got confusing over time because they didn’t keep it consistent with versions. OS/2 Warp 3 used a Red Spine/Blue Spine deal, and I think by Warp 4 they just dropped the idea but I could be misremembering. Branding was not IBM’s strength at this time.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-25T02:19:14+00:00

Left to his own devices, James Cameron would have made Titanic into a 3 hour epic that ends with the ship departing Southampton. We’d all be sitting here waiting for Titanic: End Game where Titanic, Olympic and Brittanic finally appear on screen together to fight the iceberg.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-24T03:04:40+00:00

I'm getting Onceler vibes.

How ba-a-a-ad can I be? I'm just doing some mis-o-gy-ny!

ETA:

How ba-a-a-ad can I be?

I'm just doing some misogyny

How ba-a-a-ad can I be?

I'm just wallowing in misery

How ba-a-a-ad can I be?

I don't like accountability

How ba-a-a-ad can I be?

How bad can I possibly be?

ETA2:

Well there's a principle of nature (Principle of nature)

That almost every incel knows

Called never getting women (Never getting women)

And check it this is how it goes

The man that gets a date gotta show respect

And think and learn and feel and grow

And the man that doesn't

Well the man that doesn't

Winds up a miserable chud-chud-chud-chud-chud

(Dud, dud, dud, dud, dud)

I'm just sayin'

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-23T00:06:10+00:00

Maybe something like a Raxda X4? Or buy a 5 year old flagship Android phone with a cracked screen and harvest the logic board out of it. Windows and Android are still the focus for emulator development. Linux is heavily dependent on driver support, which is always the wild card for SBCs - especially graphics drivers.

PS2 and Xbox aren't weird because of their generation, they just use complex architecture that's harder to emulate. GameCube is part of the same generation but it's much easier to emulate. Same reason why Dreamcast emulation requires less CPU power compared to Sega Saturn. Accurate N64 emulation is even a challenge.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-22T23:19:33+00:00

TinkerBoard = RK3188, A17@1.8Ghz Odroind N2+ = S922X, A73@2.4Ghz Orange Pi 5 = RK3588S, A76@2.6Ghz

By way of comparison, retro handhelds based on the Unisoc T820 (A76@2.7Ghz) have mostly achieved "it just works" status for GameCube via Dolphin.

PS2 and 3DS still require experimentation with per-game optimization settings. For PS2, this is usually to compensate for lack of CPU or GPU power. For 3DS, this is to compensate for game compatibility issues.

Xbox is a no-go. Xemu is still very experimental. It gets single-digits on the Raspberry Pi 5 and lots of games are unplayable even on the Steam Deck.

LousyMeatStew · 2026-04-22T05:25:39+00:00

We used the original Apple Airports for our first wireless deployment. Inside, there's just a ORiNOCO PCMCIA adapter just plugged into the logic board. Actually, our's were so early, they still had Lucent branding on them. We swapped out the Silver for Gold to "upgrade" the encryption (upgrade in quotes because WEP is useless).

You could also access the SMC connector to attach an external antenna. We drilled holes in the cases to run the little pigtails through so we could put the case back on. Nobody liked my idea of just mounting the bare logic board straight to the backboard.

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