• fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        Computers in 97 didn’t need much in the way of cooling. A large passive heatsink was plenty for those CPUs. They’re not the 300+ watt behemoths we have today.

        • Pacmanlives@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I really remember heatsinks being a thing on overclocked systems around that time frame and then once we got to P4 cpus the chilling towers appeared those things were massive

          • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            5 months ago

            The lower power 486s didn’t even need a heatsink. The P3 was the first to take a heasink resembling what we have today, but damn did the P4s need some serious cooling.

            It’s kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.

            • Illecors@lemmy.cafe
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              5 months ago

              It’s kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.

              It really isn’t. Modern mobile cpus barely sip power.

              • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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                5 months ago

                If you meant cell phones and tablets, that’s mostly due to the different architecture. RISC processors are super energy efficient, which also makes them much cooler to run.

                x86-64 is a CISC architecture, which tends to be much more power hungry. There are only a couple of very low power Celeron CPUs that work under 10W of TDP, while that’s very common among phones’ CPUs.

                • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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                  5 months ago

                  x86-64 is a CISC architecture

                  In many cases it’s actually RISC under the hood and uses an interpreter to translate the CISC commands and run them in the most optimal manner on the silicon

                  ARM and RISC-V absolutely scale up to multi-hundred watt server CPUs quite easily. Just look at the Ampere systems you can rent from various VPSes for example

                  The big benefit that ARM and RISC-V have is they have no established backwards compatibility to keep carrying technical debt forwards. ARM versions their instruction sets and software has to be released for given versions of ARM cores, and RISC-V is simply too new to have any significant technical debt on the instruction set side.

                  Atom cores were notable for focusing the architecture on some instructions then other instructions would be a slog to execute, so they were really good at certain things and for desktop use (especially in the extremely budget machines they got shoved into) they were painful. Much like how eCores are now. They’re very carefully architected for power efficiency, and do their jobs extremely well, but an all eCore CPU is a slog for desktop use in many cases

    • Kairos@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
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        5 months ago

        I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won’t stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.

        • Kairos@lemmy.today
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          5 months ago

          Huh yeah that’s MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.

            • Kairos@lemmy.today
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              5 months ago

              Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast “<Type> Error” during startup to be infinitely more helpful.

              • Dave@lemmy.nz
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                5 months ago

                I don’t think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that’s about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.

                • thejml@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  I had an Athlon motherboard with voice POST messages… one night I woke up to it saying “your CPU has a problem!” over and over and was freaked out until I was completely awake and figure out what was wrong.

                  It wasn’t high quality coming through the piezo speaker, but it was good enough.

                  • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    That would be way more complex to have the motherboard play than a sequence of beeps at different frequencies. Especially at the time.