I used to run WinNT 4.0 on a 486 with 12MB of RAM. It worked quite OK (but editing long documents with Word brought it to its knees!).

Slackware, on the other hand, never complained.

yes sure my p2 run xp and it has 32 mb ram but only issue is the old graphic driver was not supported but it work with default xp driver and sloppy.

Why you guys going back with OS's and rams ?

@ijAcK

Wanna make your N900 faster ? there is too many ways to do that...search TMO or head up directly for cssu-thumb after a clean reflash !

./sifo

Is it? I remember my p2 333Mhz overclocked to 415 could hardly play DVD's, no question about 720p.

I beg to differ! I don't like ketchup

The *CPU* is much faster. However, at least in the old days, the *GPU* was very primitive, and did not provide any assistance, so your average Pentium II had to do all the work in order to play a video.

A much simpler example is MP3. With a 486 you basically could not play MP3, you needed at least a Pentium II (or an overclocked Pentium, but those used to burn through the motherboards).

Your average Nokia feature-phone plays MP3 without a hiccup.

for me N900 is not slow. Install CSSU-Thumb and see its smoothness.

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.

In 2000/2001, Siemens SL45 could play MP3, which was first phone able to do so. (of course it was hindered by limited 32MB MMC storage...)
The SoC is Infineon E-GOLD+ PMB6850 (based on 16-bit microcontroller Infineon C166CBC) supported by MAS3507 MPEG 1/2 Layer 2/3 Audio Decoder hardware.

Beat that.

// ah, the days of E-Gold+ firmware hacking...

I have a pentium 3 lapto at 1ghz with xp 768mb ram and I can say it just a little bit faster than my n900 at 900mhz. I can also prove it using some emulators and internet exlpore