@hxvy0 It is a hard thing to deal with but having suboptimal hardware makes a better computer user. I made my pre Zen AMD CPU outperform 3rd gen i5 desktops by optimizing everything I could. Even the computational tasks were faster. In a benchmark they would easily kill my A10 by at least a factor of 2.
It's not what one has but how they use it.
My reasoning was lower cost, lower power usage, less material usage, easier to replace, less heat etc.
Using Gentoo has not only allowed me to optimise the packages, but as a CLI/TUI-only user (with few exceptions), I rarely get beyond 4 GiB RAM and 1 core used. I can easily run a daily driver system on 2 GiB RAM and 1 core.
@inference @hxvy0 I have one before Zen and the PSP. It's so scuffed of a design that I don't require microcode updates. Everything is mitigated in the kernel on the few exploits that could actually work on the hardware.
It's the generation where it was apparent they were nearing SMT as I have what looks like a dual core that's actually a quad core. It's an odd architecture if you want to look into it. I believe they were either Bulldozer or Excavator cores. They perform like they are named.
I did something similar to what you did with Gentoo. I used Ubuntu Kylin and built a hardened and optimized Kernel. I also built everything from source code to optimize it for my system. I did chassis modifications to lower thermals and swapped to low voltage ram of the same speed and it allowed my system to use dual channel memory and it is operating on more RAM than it officially supports.
Are you talking about the Athalon Silver?
> It's an odd architecture if you want to look into it.
I think you're referring to when AMD did a weird thing by sharing 1 FPU/ALU between 2 cores or something. I don't know the exact details, but it was like a core/cache/ALU/FPU sharing hybrid thing.
> Are you talking about the Athalon Silver?
Athlon 200GE.
@inference @hxvy0 Yes that's the exact stage I was referring to. If you haven't experienced it, it performed like garbage at first and then performance gradually improved. It was a weird experience but I have never seen an Intel with the thermal and boost control of those processors. It was a normal load or the fans started to sound like they were a distant jet using afterburner. Really good iGPU on those and that's essentially all they had going for them.
That's a nice Athalon. Minimalism is underappreciated now and it's almost as if it's foreign.
