vardump

Heresy! 6502/6510 was the only true CPU back then!

(In other words, my daddy bought me a C64 in the eighties. ;-))

The average scalar (=integer) instructions per cycle is pretty comparable between Pentium III and Xtensa LX6, the original ESP32 CPU representing the worst case.

While P3 is superscalar, it could only execute about 0.9 instructions per cycle on average. Of course you can optimize for it and get better results in certain cases.

Most Xtensa scalar instructions take just 1 clock, branches 3 for taken, 1 for not taken. So 0.7-0.8 instructions per clock is a reasonable estimate. Assuming of course code is executing from SRAM.

Xtensa's FPU is slow, and it lacks divide and square root instructions. Clock for clock, P3 probably outperforms it by 3-4x. It also lacks 64-bit floats.

The compiler does not generate SIMD instructions on this platform. So they're not "normal" instructions in that sense.

Or perhaps you want to argue that everything is running "normal" instructions. Be it a hardware video decoder or a GPU.

That was reality in the eighties! You could open some cars using a popsicle stick as a key. Fun times!

Well, there's just one dictator involved, Putin. Trump is supporting him right now.

Ah, I could have sworn it's Copeland. Thanks for the correction.

Copeland... (That was the actual name of supposed future Apple's OS 30 years ago, sounds kinda different with 2026 perspective.)

That sounds right.

Although so far I'm mostly happy with Apple products. Happier than with any Windows laptops.

(But damn if I encounter a bug or an issue. Just reporting those have made hordes of Apple fans attack me, in response to a standard technical bug report.)

0-60 mph 0.81s.

According to Musk, 0.5 mach max speed.

He also said it can corner better than any car in the world due to massive downforce. And that it'll be in production in 2028.

We'll see.

The Musk we wish we had all the time: tech Musk.

If only he just stuck to tech.

Didn’t check agy or AI studio, but at least Argon is available in Gemini page/app.

Zero censorship? Who do you think you are kidding?

Fair enough. I agree there are many kinds of 4k demos.

The first thing a 4k demo is going to do is to decompress executable. The second thing is to procedurally generate assets. Perhaps also do some code generation. So the cache footprint is going to be larger.

At this point you can be talking about 600 kB on a DOS machine. Sky is the limit on modern systems.

That said, typical inner loops of that era demos were pretty small, usually 20-200 byte range, IIRC.

Pre-cache era demos often had huge unrolled self-modifying speedcode inner loops, but that's another matter.

Cycle accurate compared to what?

Even with a cycle accurate CPU you'd still have a lot of variation caused by the motherboard chipsets, DRAM speeds, cache chips and graphics cards.

Tseng ET4000 was on a completely different level than something like Cirrus Logic CL-GD510 or heaven forbid, Oak Technologies card.

If the era appropriate PCs had huge variations, what extra does cycle accuracy really bring at this point? The same PC demo could perform very differently on two 486DX2 66 MHz PCs.