One of the great benefits of Open Source

Posted Nov 3, 2025 11:36 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
In reply to: One of the great benefits of Open Source by anselm
Parent article: Debian to require Rust as of May 2026

Plus the really insane phase of Moore's law/Denmark scaling was around the Pentium to Pentium 4 period (1995 to 2002 say) when it felt like computers based on x86 processors became obsolete in a year or two. Alpha is from around that era, but m68k is before that. The 68060 is microarchitecture-wise comparable with the Pentium, and with worse clock speeds at that.

One of the great benefits of Open Source

Posted Nov 5, 2025 9:45 UTC (Wed) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

New computers used to become twice as fast and large (RAM/storage) in 18 months. After 4 or 5 years, they were obsolete.
In sharp contrast, my current desktop has only 50% more RAM than the 7-year old machine it replaced, which is my absolute low record of RAM size increase.

Dennard scaling

Posted Nov 14, 2025 0:44 UTC (Fri) by jrincayc (guest, #29129) [Link]

Dennard (not Denmark) scaling was awesome while it lasted from ~1970 to ~2006, since each individual transistor got both faster and used less power when the size decreased. Now transistors keep getting smaller, but they use roughly the same amount of power and are about the same speed, so individual CPU cores are not improving much. In relation to the article, it means that hardware goes obsolete a lot slower than it used to.