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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:
This was quite fun, the recent less scripted content has been a nice change of pace :)
The Crusoe processors actually seem really cool
AFAIK these aren't even true x86 processors, with them running an adaptive x86 compatibility layer on a weird power efficiency focused architecture. They are very funky guys for this, with slightly increasing perfomance the more times you run though a task.
Janus Cycle, covered a not too disimilar machine a few years back, with some more detail on how the Crusoe works if that's of interest to anyone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6xbDiDuFU0
(Extremely IIRC voice) Intel was stuck in an awkward generation while the Crusoe was under development (and without that, I don't think they would have gotten any investors). By the time that Crusoe was ready to ship, Intel was shipping chips with uOPs and i-cache, which did a better job of getting past x86 opcode sins than crusoe could do.
A lot of (/.) folks followed Transmeta's pursuits at the time because (1) it was an interesting development, and (0) they hired Linus Torvalds. That one hire brought them a hell of a lot of free market attention.
Tbh I had no idea there was any achitectural problems with x86 at the time, I had entirely understood this as a Wild & Wacky solution to making the processors cheaper to run off of a battery rather than fixing any particular issue(s).
It just very much has the air of doing something you aren't supposed to, which more computers should aspire to imo
oh this was the era of the pentium 4! intel was struggling hard to figure out what was going on with ia-32 and not doing great. famously, they had to deliver P4s with shockingly high (for the era) clockspeeds to match AMDs performance, and the architectural issues with the P4 were so bad that, from what I'm told, they literally threw out the entire design and went back to the P3 in order to develop the core series.
it was really the last time in history that someone could poke their head into the PC space and develop a new processor, and in fact at least three different companies were doing that around this time. it's not that any of them had the slightest chance at long-term competition of course, but there was a niche: intel was having a really hard time delivering mobile processors based on the P4. they did have a mobile P4, but i think it ate power and pissed heat. what was far, far, far more commonplace IME was the pentium M, which appeared in 2003, six years before the first core processors, but was yet again based on the pentium 3, not the 4.
it was an absolutely wild time
I am never going to get over the "Let's Ask the Internet" jingle it makes me smile every time
Also while I'm commenting, I love these little less scripted vids!
Waitasecond, did Sony put a 4-pin firewire port on that thing, and a DC-out port next to it so that they could power an optical drive accessory?
Did Sony do that instead of just putting in a goddamn 6-pin port, which would take up the exact same panel space as the 4 pin and DC ports?? Yeah, it's a Sony allright.
it's hard to argue for that when virtually nobody had ever plugged anything into a PC (nor did they ever) other than a camcorder, and the 4-pin i.link port fit the cable that came with millions of cameras sold from 1997-2003
didn't mean for that to sound terse, just, i think their reasoning was extremely solid. there were no other firewire products being bought by PC users
I think they just did it because they co-opted the smaller Firewire port as their iLink interface thing and it had to be -branded-.
i miss sony building weird cool shit that you might not actually want. i assume (daydream) they still do for the japanese market