I see your point, although I didn't mean my comment exactly as a complaint - simply a measure of relative position. I don't expect an XO to run as fast as my school computer, considering all the constraints on the design, as well as the very-much-still-in-development software. I've also played with various models and the more recent ones (and more recent versions of Sugar) definitely run more nicely.
<br><br>-Nikki<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 19, 2007 3:17 AM, Ivan Krstiæ <<a href="mailto:krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu">krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Nov 18, 2007, at 5:22 PM, Nikki Lee wrote:<br>> XOs do run slowly, which I personally have found plenty frustrating.<br><br><br></div>The first widely-used desktop x86 CPUs running at approximately the
<br>speed of the XO's CPU became available with the introduction of the<br>Pentium II Deschutes in 1998. With a 100MHz FSB, you could drive the<br>core at 450MHz -- at 27.1W TDP. By comparison, our Geode has 3.9% less
<br>clock speed, four times the L1 cache, a quarter of the L2 cache, and<br>consumes about a tenth of the power.<br><br>Deschutes-based processors were in wide use in 1999 and 2000. People<br>who owned computers with clean OS installs those years by and large
<br>didn't complain about their computers being too slow or even<br>particularly frustratingly slow to use.<br><br>For the most part, this means that modern software has become<br>incredibly bloated and just awfully bloody stupid. Dave Jones
<br>elaborated on the latter a bit in his OLS 2006 talk:<br><br> <<a href="https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/jones-reprint.pdf" target="_blank">https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/jones-reprint.pdf</a>>
<br><br>We've done a lot of work in trying to cut through the bloat, but we've<br>had to -- in parallel -- develop a software platform from scratch,<br>deal with hardware unlike anything people have worked with before, and
<br>actually make this into a shipping product. There's still _a lot_ of<br>optimization to be done, both in known paths and in places that we're<br>only yet to discover.<br><br>So, those of you frustrated by the current state of affairs, I urge
<br>you to focus your frustration towards getting out your profilers,<br>debuggers, torches and pitchforks, and being as mean as you can<br>possibly be to the code throughout the stack.<br><br>We'll gladly take patches.
<br><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>--<br>Ivan Krstiæ <<a href="mailto:krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu">krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu</a>> | <a href="http://radian.org" target="_blank">http://radian.org</a>
<br><br></div></div></blockquote></div><br>