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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 4 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.505s | source
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NovemberWhiskey ◴[23 Jun 23 14:42 UTC] No.36447461[source]▶
Some additional things to note:

Windows NT 3.51 minimum hardware requirements were a i386 or i486 processor at 25MHz or better and 12MB of RAM for the workstation version. So the 600MHz machine with 128MB RAM is exceeding the minimum requirement by (conservatively) 24x in CPU speed and 10x in RAM, along with all the architectural improvements from going from the i386 to what's presumably a Pentium III-class machine.

If that's actually a Surface Go 2 running Windows 11 - well, it doesn't have a quad-core i5 as the tweet claims - the Surface Go 2 came with a Pentium Gold or a Core m3; both with only two cores and of those is an ultra-low power variant.

As such, that exactly meets the minimum CPU specification for Windows 11 and only doubles the minimum 4GB RAM requirement.

I'm not trying to apologize for the difference here, but it's not an entirely like-for-like comparison.

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Solvency ◴[23 Jun 23 15:03 UTC] No.36447813[source]▶
Why is Win11 so slow and unoptimized that it needs such crazy hardware.
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JohnFen ◴[23 Jun 23 15:16 UTC] No.36448008[source]▶
I don't think it's unoptimized as much as it's extremely bloated.
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1. Narishma ◴[23 Jun 23 15:37 UTC] No.36448358[source]▶
What's the difference?
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2. bunga-bunga ◴[23 Jun 23 15:50 UTC] No.36448565[source]▶
/s

Bloat is intentional and fills Microsoft’s wallet.

Optimization drains Microsoft’s wallet.

3. JohnFen ◴[23 Jun 23 15:53 UTC] No.36448603[source]▶
"Bloat" includes the addition of intentional, but frivolous, features. An application can be well-optimized but still slow simply because it's doing too much.

But I think the reason that most modern software performs badly is because of optimization: we're optimizing to reduce production costs over increasing performance.

It's economic in nature. We minimize production costs by using frameworks and other labor-saving tools. The code produced using these tools tends to be poor, but hardware is cheap enough to make up for poorly performing software.

It's an intentional decision.

4. nullindividual ◴[23 Jun 23 18:36 UTC] No.36450623[source]▶
A meaningless term to deride a feature or service you don't like or use.