Woah... Can't imagine how long that will take. How are the 4 hard drives combined? Some sort of raid0 or spanning?
Nice! I think that's the first non ES Bulldozer result I've seen so far.
The oldest machine I've seen run this is a dual-socket Pentium Pro. I think the minimum OS requirement is Windows XP. So if a 486 can't run Windows XP, it probably don't be able to run the program. You'll also need at least 100mb of ram to do anything meaningful.
The next version of y-cruncher will has SSE3 as a minimum requirement, so that will push the minimum requirement to the later Pentium 4's.
It wasn't an easy decision to make: The 32-bit binaries rely on about 20,000 lines of older code that the 64-bit binaries don't use. However, this older code is incompatible with all the new code in v0.6.x. When I tried force compiling the 64-bit code on x86, the x86 SSE3 binary turned out to be the same speed, but the x86 no-SSE binary ended up being 20% slower (because the x87 FPU stack sucks*).
So I decided to just drop x86 no-SSE completely for v0.6.x. (which also allows me to cut out those 20,000 lines)
*It takes a very special kind of hand-tuning to make the x87 FPU efficient. These tricks tend to clash with the tricks that are used to make SSE efficient. So no more x87 FPU. I'm getting rid of those 20,000 lines and making SSE3 the minimum requirement.
Bookmarks