[Olpc-open] OLPC G1G1 sales start today

[Ivan Krstić]

On Nov 18, 2007, at 5:22 PM, Nikki Lee wrote:
> XOs do run slowly, which I personally have found plenty frustrating.


The first widely-used desktop x86 CPUs running at approximately the  
speed of the XO's CPU became available with the introduction of the  
Pentium II Deschutes in 1998. With a 100MHz FSB, you could drive the  
core at 450MHz -- at 27.1W TDP. By comparison, our Geode has 3.9% less  
clock speed, four times the L1 cache, a quarter of the L2 cache, and  
consumes about a tenth of the power.

Deschutes-based processors were in wide use in 1999 and 2000. People  
who owned computers with clean OS installs those years by and large  
didn't complain about their computers being too slow or even  
particularly frustratingly slow to use.

For the most part, this means that modern software has become  
incredibly bloated and just awfully bloody stupid. Dave Jones  
elaborated on the latter a bit in his OLS 2006 talk:

     <https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/jones-reprint.pdf>

We've done a lot of work in trying to cut through the bloat, but we've  
had to -- in parallel -- develop a software platform from scratch,  
deal with hardware unlike anything people have worked with before, and  
actually make this into a shipping product. There's still _a lot_ of  
optimization to be done, both in known paths and in places that we're  
only yet to discover.

So, those of you frustrated by the current state of affairs, I urge  
you to focus your frustration towards getting out your profilers,  
debuggers, torches and pitchforks, and being as mean as you can  
possibly be to the code throughout the stack.

We'll gladly take patches.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org