I doubt that the Pentium II is clock-wise much faster than a OMAP3 Cortex-A8. You can check for the "BOGOMIPS" during Linux kernel boot for the N900 and than for the PC. Even as ARM MIPS cannot be directly compared to the x68 ones. Btw, wikipedia claims 2.0 DMIPS/MHz for A8.

But where the Pentium II stops at 400 MHz, the N900 A8 has already 600 MHz and can easily reach 1 GHz with overclocking or with the N9.

So I would rather compare it to a Pentium III with the same clock speed. PIII also has SSE which can be compared to NEON on the A8. PII had only MMX afaik.

There were no "GPUs" in those old days, just CPUs and the first 3D graphics cards. Some of them (ATI) already supported complete MPEG-2 hardware decoding and most of the other cards did at least some hardware YUV/RGB transformation and video scaling. But there were also some extra MPEG-2 hardware decoder cards for slower CPUs. In addition the PII also had MMX which could speedup the video decoding but during this time AMD was one step ahead with 3DNow before Intel came up with SSE on the PIII later.

I started playing MP3s on a 486DX2-66. No problems there at least with 128kbs CBR and the Frauenhofer/Xing/Winamp players. Upgrading to DX4-133 and K5 later of course helped to get some free cpu cycles


Shure, you just need a 25 MIPS or less DSP to do all the decoding.
This at least a 486 can offer. And you could use some optimized integer based software decoder as MAD.

M.