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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#141

Post by bee_rider »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #33
vardump wrote: post #2

I sometimes wonder what the alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties would look like. We might have had to manage with just a few MB of RAM and efficient ARM cores running at maybe 30 MHz or so. Would we still get web browsers? How about the rest of the digital transformation? One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

For me the interesting alternate reality is where CPUs got stuck in the 200-400mhz range for speed, but somehow continued to become more efficient. It’s kind of the ideal combination in some ways. It’s fast enough to competently run a nice desktop GUI, but not so fast that you can get overly fancy with it. Eventually you’d end up OSes that look like highly refined versions of System 7.6/Mac OS 8 or Windows 2000, whic…

I sometimes drop by cpu down to the 400Mhz-800Mhz range. 400 is rough. 800, not so bad. It runs fine, with something like i3 or sway.

If we really got stuck in the hundreds of MHz range, I guess we’d see many-core designs coming to consumers earlier. Could have been an interesting world.

Although, I think it would mostly be impossible. Or maybe we’re in that universe already. If you are getting efficiency but not speed, you can always add parallelism. One form of parallelism is pipelining. We’re at like 20 pipeline stages nowadays, right? So in the ideal case if we weren’t able to parallelize in that dimension we’d be at something like 6Ghz/20=300Mhz. That’s pretty hand-wavey, but maybe it is a fun framing.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#143

Post by tom_ »

graemep wrote: post #47
peterfirefly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.

I cannot recall crashes being a problem.

With Windows 9x, I recall the crashes being manageable, but it was advisable to give the system 15 minutes to settle down after rebooting. Windows would start multiple things at once on startup and it was a bit risky to overstress it.

Windows NT 4 seemed OK, but a lot of software didn't run.

By the time of Windows 2000 the tradeoff was much better.

(Allowing a settle down time remained a good idea, in my experience. Even if Windows 2000 and later were very unlikely to actually crash, the response time would still be dogshit until everything had been given time to settle into a steady state. This problem didn't get properly fixed until pervasive use of SSDs - some time between Windows 7 and Windows 8, maybe? - and even then the fix was just that there was no longer any pressing need to actually fix it.)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#144

Post by lucaspiller »

vardump wrote: post #2

I sometimes wonder what the alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties would look like. We might have had to manage with just a few MB of RAM and efficient ARM cores running at maybe 30 MHz or so. Would we still get web browsers? How about the rest of the digital transformation? One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

I'm in the early phases of working on a game that explores that.

The backstory is that in the late 2050s when AI has its hands in everything, humans loose trust of it. There are a few high profile incidents - based on AI decisions -, which cause public opinion to change, and an initiative is brought in to ensure important systems run hardware and software that can be trusted and human reviewed.

A 16bit CPU architecture - with no pipelining, speculative execution etc is chosen, as it's powerful enough to run such systems, but also simple enough that a human can fully understand the hardware and software.

The goal is to make a near-future space exploration MMO. My Macbook Pro can simulate 3000 CPU cores simultaneously, and I have a lot of fun ideas for it. The irony is that I'm using LLMs to build it :D

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#145

Post by strawhatguy »

Aurornis wrote: post #135
canpan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GameBoy Advance could run 2D games (and some 3D demos) on 2 AA batteries for 16 hours. I wonder if we could get something more efficient with modern tech? It seems research made things faster but more power hungry. We compensate with better batteries instead. I guess we can and it's a design goal problem, I also do love a screen with backlight.

> It seems research made things faster but more power hungry No, modern CPUs are far more power efficient for the same compute. The primary power draw in a simple handheld console like would be the screen and sound. Putting an equivalent MCU on a modern process into that console would make the CPU power consumption so low as to be negligible.

Yes; yet... I thought the efficiency per compute has to do more with the nm process shrinking the die than anything else. That and power use is divided by so many more instructions per second

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#146

Post by eqvinox »

vardump wrote: post #2

I sometimes wonder what the alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties would look like. We might have had to manage with just a few MB of RAM and efficient ARM cores running at maybe 30 MHz or so. Would we still get web browsers? How about the rest of the digital transformation? One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

You'd probably get much more multiprocessor stuff much earlier. There's probably 2 or 3 really good interfaces to wire an almost arbitrary number of CPUs together and run some software across all of them (AMP not SMP).

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#147

Post by ghssds »

antidamage wrote: post #105
Aurornis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get. No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow . Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember…

It's not an accurate recollection at all. In 1990 a couple of us 12 year olds snuck into the university library to use the web to look at the Marathon website. It took 5 minutes to load some trivially-sized gifs and a tiny amount of HTML. They had a pretty decent connection for the day. Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.

That's really cool you visited in 1990, three years before the first graphical web browser, a website with image about a game released in 1994.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#148

Post by dheera »

Aurornis wrote: post #52
dheera wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would we still get web browsers? Yes, just that they would not run millions of lines of JavaScript for some social media tracking algorithm, newsletter signup, GDPR popup, newsletter popup, ad popup, etc. and you'd probably just be presented with the text only and at best a relevant static image or two. The web would be a place to get long-form information, sort of a massive e-book, not a battleground of corporatio…

The whitewashing of the past in this thread is something else. Did everyone forget the era of web browsing when pages were filled with distracting animated banner ads? The period when it was common for malicious ads to just hijack the session and take you to a different page? The pop-up tornados where a page would spawn pop ups faster than you could close them? Pop unders getting left behind to discover when you clos…

Most of what you describe were the late 1990s/early 2000s, not the days of NCSA Mosaic.

Also

> distracting animated banner ads

These were characteristic of the late 90s, but were way easier to block back then. Just put "0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net" in your /etc/hosts and 99% of them went away. Or send them to 127.0.0.1 and serve a white single pixel GIF with Apache to avoid web browsers hanging on the request.

The popups of the late 90s were easy to get rid of too, all you had to do was disable JS. There were almost zero websites that did anything good with JS back then.

Flash crap? Don't install it if you don't want it.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#149

Post by nxobject »

Aurornis wrote: post #135
canpan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GameBoy Advance could run 2D games (and some 3D demos) on 2 AA batteries for 16 hours. I wonder if we could get something more efficient with modern tech? It seems research made things faster but more power hungry. We compensate with better batteries instead. I guess we can and it's a design goal problem, I also do love a screen with backlight.

> It seems research made things faster but more power hungry No, modern CPUs are far more power efficient for the same compute. The primary power draw in a simple handheld console like would be the screen and sound. Putting an equivalent MCU on a modern process into that console would make the CPU power consumption so low as to be negligible.

As a consumer product example: e-ink readers. (Of course, it helps as well that the GameBoy had no radios etc...)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#150

Post by nxobject »

PostOnce wrote: post #119
alexisread wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from transputers mentioned already, there’s https://greenarrays.com/home/documents/g144apps.php Both the hardware and the forth software. APIs in a B2B style would likely be much more prevalent, less advertising (yay!) and less money in the internet so more like the original internet I guess. GUIs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS Show that we could have had q…

I want to chime in on SymbOS, which I think is the perfect reply to the GP's curiosity. https://www.symbos.org/shots.htm This is what slow computers with a few hundred kB of RAM can do.

The original Macintosh had similar specs as well – 128k with a 68k clocked at ~6-7 MHz. It helps that both platforms put a significant amount of OS code in ROM.
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