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[Brian Ellis]

My very ordinary office computer just calculated pi to 33.55 million digits in 21 minutes 55 seconds. To a mere 1 million places it took exactly 22 seconds. Compare this to what it took in 1995:

In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes within 3 days with Pentium 90MHz, 40MB main memory and 340MB available storage.

Such is progress!

URL for software: http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=36
Scroll down to Primary download site (or mirror site)

Edit: I had a capital Greek pi in the thread title, forgetting that this bloody BB software refuses to accept many non-Latin characters and even some diacritical Latin ones, such as a-grave.

[TransformX]

Specs for your ordinary office computer? Afterall, it could be anywhere from a single core PIII to a dual core E5300 these days.

[Brian Ellis]

System

Processor
Model : Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5200 @ 2.50GHz
Speed : 2.49GHz
Cores per Processor : 2 Unit(s)
Threads per Core : 1 Unit(s)
Type : Dual-Core
Internal Data Cache : 2x 32kB Synchronous, Write-Thru, 8-way set, 64 byte line size
L2 On-board Cache : 1x 2MB ECC Synchronous, ATC, 8-way set, 64 byte line size, 2 threads sharing

Mainboard
Bus(es) : ISA PCI PCIe IMB USB i2c/SMBus
MP Support : 1 Processor(s)
MP APIC : Yes
System BIOS : American Megatrends Inc. 8.14
System : ECS G31T-M7
Mainboard : ECS G31T-M7
Total Memory : 2GB

Chipset 1
Model : Elitegroup Computer Sys ??? (29C0)
Front Side Bus Speed : 4x 208MHz (832MHz data rate)

Video System
Adapter : Intel(R) G33/G31 Express Chipset Family (this steals RAM as graphics memory)

Physical Storage Devices
Removable Drive : Floppy disk drive
Hard Disk : SAMSUNG HD160JJ (149GB)
Hard Disk : SAMSUNG HD161HJ (149GB)
Hard Disk : SAMSUNG SP0802N (75GB)
CD-ROM/DVD : TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223F (CD 48X Rd, 48X Wr) (DVD 6X Rd, 6X Wr)


Peripherals
Serial/Parallel Port(s) : 1 COM / 1 LPT
USB Controller/Hub : Intel(R) 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB Universal Host Controller - 27C8
USB Controller/Hub : Intel(R) 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB Universal Host Controller - 27C9
USB Controller/Hub : Intel(R) 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB Universal Host Controller - 27CA
USB Controller/Hub : Intel(R) 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB Universal Host Controller - 27CB
USB Controller/Hub : Intel(R) 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 Enhanced Host Controller - 27CC
USB Controller/Hub : USB Root Hub
USB Controller/Hub : USB Root Hub
USB Controller/Hub : USB Root Hub
USB Controller/Hub : USB Root Hub
USB Controller/Hub : USB Root Hub
Keyboard : Cherry PS/2 Keyboard Driver for CDI
Mouse : HID-compliant mouse
Human Interface : USB Human Interface Device


Power Management
AC Line Status : On-Line

Operating System(s)
Windows System : Microsoft Windows XP/2002 Professional 5.01.2600 (Service Pack 3)

Network Services
Adapter : Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC
Adapter : Atheros L2 Fast Ethernet 10/100 Base-T Controller

[TransformX]

Modern ordinary computer then, CPU is stronger than my 'gaming rig' at home

Then again, if that calculation software is multithreaded, I suspect a brand new Intel i5 processor will be at least twice as fast as your machine.

[Brian Ellis]

Hardly multithreaded; it was published in 1995!!!

Yes it is modern but was not bought for performance, in fact it was the bottom-of-the-range when I bought it for €280, including €30 for the second Mb of DDR2 RAM.

[Evildead666]

The Lenovo computers we get at work are just about that same config.
Not ECS mobos tho.

They are very fast when it comes down to it.
They are replacing P4 3.06GHz machines, which seem ultimately slow in comparison...

[VJ]

Did you print it...?

But yes: such is progress... Amazing really, when one thinks about all the power we currently have available, and how little is used for most of the time. And when it is needed, we still need to wait...
(they should find something to deal with this sudden burst in performance requirements, I know some systems do adaptive overclocking, but it mostly just has a marginal effect)

Jörg

[Wulfman]

cloud computing, amazon EC2? you buy computing power simply when you need it?

mfg
wulfman

[Brian Ellis]

cloud computing, amazon EC2? you buy computing power simply when you need it?

With the exception of my video-editing computer, all my computers are grossly over-specified for my real needs, by orders of magnitude. If the software were available and compatible, a 386/25 MHz under MS-DOS 5 or 6 would fill most of my needs. It's really Windows that has pushed us in this direction of ever-more-powerful computers.

Remember when WordPerfect came on one 5¼" floppy? It was the standard word processor of it's day and had at least 80%, if not 90%, of the functionality of Word today. I can't type my text documents any faster today than I could then.

I wrote a very complex scientific software using Asyst (a scientific version of Forth, that wonderful language) about 1992, running under MS-DOS 3.n. It was less than 400 kb of compiled software.After I retired, someone transposed it for Windows 98, using Borland C/C++ with some 3rd party scientific libraries. The new software, actually with slightly less functionality, took up about 35 Mb of HDD, about 85 times the volume!!!! Granted, it may have looked prettier, but who cares when the graphics were adequate under DOS?

[Wulfman]

If the software were available and compatible, a 386/25 MHz under MS-DOS 5 or 6 would fill most of my needs. It's really Windows that has pushed us in this direction of ever-more-powerful computers.

Remember when WordPerfect came on one 5¼" floppy? It was the standard word processor of it's day and had at least 80%, if not 90%, of the functionality of Word today. I can't type my text documents any faster today than I could then.

I cannot agree - I remember that an IBM 386-something with works couldn´t hold up to my typing speed back then. not to mention the inability to handle images, complex diagrams and an actual preview ("WYSIWYG" ) - you seriously want to tell me that word only gained 20% new features over 20 years? you might not use them, but a lot of handy stuff was added since then. side note: I´m not even talking about videos or even images here - I can´t see a 386 holding up to them.

ramblings of an old person - not everything was better, and not all change is bad.

mfg
wulfman

[Evildead666]

Word used to be for printing out documents for sending.
I remember writing a resume on an Amstrad 1512, and printing it out on a dot-matrix 9-pin.

I was so proud that it was done on computer.

Today, and since the 90's, documents are created not for printing, but for sending via email, and opening on another machine.

All you have to hope for, is that you aren't using OO when someone sends you a document in a recent version of Word....byebye formatting...

OO all the way.

[Brian Ellis]

I´m not even talking about videos or even images here - I can´t see a 386 holding up to them.

Sorry, but my first linear video software was run on a 386/25 with 387 arithmetic co-processor, 1024 kb RAM and 20 Mb HDD! DOS was amazingly performing. I also ran IBM speech recognition on the same machine and many graphics proggies (e.g., Corel Draw! and Photopaint), including Ventura DTP which was fully WYSIWYG and printed circuit design CADs, also WYSIWYG. I also had multi-tasking (forget the name of the software, but it was written by the same people as DR-DOS). It was general-purpose GUIs like Windows that started to slow things up (and cause WordPerfect's downfall).

[Evildead666]

Digital Research DOS had a version called 'Concurrent DOS' where many programs could be run concurrently in DOS.
Later versions of DR-DOS had it inbuilt. DR-DOS 7 afaik is capable.
I ran it in a VMWare virtual machine to check it out while I was bored, and it could have up to at least 8 different DOS instances at once, each doing something different.

The computer archives have a video from the computer chronicles which has it being showcased...back from the 80's iirc...

edit : It could have been CP/M, my brothers bought it for the Amstrad CPC way back...

[VJ]

CP/M wasn't like that (I had an Amstrad... ), but in DR DOS 6 you already had a taskswitcher. The tasks were not running concurrently though, but it was actually possible to run Windows 3.11 and then switch to another DOS program (of course, I had to try things like that )...

But still: your computer is sitting there doing nothing, and when you want to open a file, you have to wait for the dialog box to come up... Or when you compile something, you have to wait for that, whereas while you are editing the cycli are wasted (actually, on my previous job we had a parallel compile system for this purpose: if you needed a full rebuild of the software, you could distribute the compilation over the computers of the other developers)


Jörg

[Evildead666]

On the computer chronicles they demo'd a 386 machine doing a database search, while they were doing something else on another 'screen'...so it seemed like concurrent processing.
It could be an interleaving trick to do more at once, but i'm not that good in how its done...

will have a look and try to find the link....