if I remember correctly the 386 didn't have branch prediction so as a thought experiment how would a 386 with design sizes from today (~9nm) fare with the other chips?

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Earw0rm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It would lose by a country mile, a 386 can handle about one instruction every three or four clocks, a modern desktop core can do as many as four or five ops PER clock.

It's not just the lack of branch prediction, but the primitive pipeline, no register renaming, and of course it's integer only.

A Pentium Pro with modern design size would at least be on the same playing field as today's cores. Slower by far, but recognisably doing the same job - you could see traces of the P6 design in modern Intel CPUs until quite recently, in the same way as the Super Hornet has traces of predecessors going back to the 1950s F-5. The CPUs in most battery chargers and earbuds would run rings around a 386.

	▲	anthk an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A 386 was a beast against a 286, a 16 bit CPU. It was the minimum to run Linux with 4MB of RAM, but a 486 with and FPU destroyed it and not just in FP performance. Bear in mind that with an 386 you can barely decode an MP2 file, while with a 486 DX you can play most MP3 files at least in mono audio and maybe run Quake at the lowest settings if you own a 100 MHZ one. A 166MHZ Pentium can at least multitask a little while playing your favourite songs. Also, under Linux, a 386 would manage itself relativelly well with just terminal and SVGAlib tools (now framebuffer) and 8MB of RAM. With a 486 and 16MB of RAM, you can run X at sane speeds, even FVWM in wireframe mode to avoid window repaintings upon moving/resizing them. Next, TLS/SSL. WIth a 486 DX you can use dropbear/bearssl and even Dillo happily with just a light lag upong handhaking, good enough for TLS 1.2. Under a 486, a 30-35? year old CPU. IRC over TLS, SSH with RSA256 and the like methods, web browsing/Gemini under Dillo with TLS. Doable, I did it under VM, it worked, even email and NNTP over TLS with a LibreSSL fork against BearSSL. With a 386 in order to keep your sanity you can have plain HTTP, IRC and Gopher and plain email/Usenet. No MP3 audio, where with a 486 you could at least read news over Gopher (even today) will multitasking if you forced yourself to a terminal environment (not as hard as it sounds). If you emulate some old i440FX based PC under Qemu, switching between the 386 and 486 with -cpu flag gives the user clear results. Just set one with the Cirrus VGA and 16MB and you'll understand upong firing X. This is a great old distro to test how well 386's and 486's behaved: https://delicate-linux.net/