Amazing. Do you have some docs / resources on this online? How would you go around building a computer out of commodity components today?
Do you think compiling everything on own computer results in noticeable increase in performance? Say, distribution provides binaries built on Intel, but I want to run on AMD, does it make sense to recompile binaries on the AMD?
Surprisingly the old textbook went to three editions, the last in 1997
[1] It looks as if it may be on archive.org [2], and is definitely in
Google Books and LibGen.
> How would you go around building a computer out of commodity
components today?
Good question. You could of course retrace my steps using 1980s
technology, but I wouldn't advise that. The problem today is physical
scale. Most components are surface mount and you really need to build
multi layer boards and use a bench microscope to place and solder.
Getting anything hand-built to reliably run faster than 100MHz without
knowing what you're doing is no fun. Everything I spent a thousand
hours building is in a SoC for $1 now.
> Do you think compiling everything on own computer results in
noticeable increase in performance?
That's a question to ask Gentoo/Arch users (and BSD people who use
Ports). I think yes, because hopefully you'll optimise for the
architecture you have. But is is worth it? Given the many hours you'll
wait, maybe not at my age :) Do it while you're young and can learn
cool things from it.
From basic computing gates all the way to running tetris. It taught me so much of the lower levels.
Also a comment as a former Gentoo user of 7+ years - the performance is there - 5-15% maybe. I honestly don't think it's noticeable, it never was to me, but what you learn using Gentoo has served me very well.
I moved on as well. I'm too old to deal with fixing things and all the waiting, I just want it to work haha
Thanks, I was disappointed first that it's only a virtual computer in a simulator, but then I found out there is a real physical realization, using an FPGA board:
Do you think compiling everything on own computer results in noticeable increase in performance? Say, distribution provides binaries built on Intel, but I want to run on AMD, does it make sense to recompile binaries on the AMD?