Sometimes I lay awake at night and think about where we would stand as a society today if the Transmeta #Crusoe wouldn't have failed due to too low supply for the sudden rise in demand.
Would intel CPUs be designed the way they are now? Or would intel have found a different way of saving energy? Maybe a #Pentium 4 would have been a really good, innovative design in that world.
Would we have another big player in the desktop and laptop #CPU market with Transmeta? Would #AMD have bought them by now?
Would Apple have considered switching to #Transmeta CPUs if there would have been several improved successors over the years?
Why is it that people seem to only think about worrying and anxiety-inducing topics when they can't fall asleep?
Would #intel have extinguished the new competitor anyway by incorporating the Crusoe's concepts, e.g. into their Pentium M line.
How would the x86-64 architecture differ from what it is?
Would Linus Torvalds have had the same amount of time available for work on Linux? Would he have delegated decisions more or earlier and if so, which decisions in the kernel development would have been made differently?
And if you want an automated CPU scheduler, auto-cpufreq is amazing: https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq . You can even use it to set charging limits to protect your battery on ThinkPads!
Around the time I was born (1979), Atari's "Asteroids" was about to appear and Namco's "Galaxian" had improved over the previous year's "Space Invaders" with tile-based color graphics.
Both used existing 8-bit CPUs (MOS' 6502 and Zilog's Z80 respectively) but 1979 also saw the introduction of the two most significant 16-bit CPUs:
It's kinda mesmerizing watching the core speeds on one of the i7-12700Ts in the #Proxmox Cluster (the one that runs Tiggi.es presently) dynamically shift cores anywhere from 1400Mhz to 4.62GHz quickly, and on an as-needed basis. The low base speed saves energy, but it'll instantly pop cores up to speeds within its thermal/power limit envelope, so for lightly-threaded workloads, it can perform as well as beefier chips. #homelab#servers#cpu