US$20 4 core ARM 1.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM Banana Pi
... takes 62 seconds to "factor primes up to 10,000". I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds rather slow, ...
I remember entering an 'Acorn User' competition when I was a kid, and you had to write a program for a BBC Micro with a 2MHz (or maybe it was 1MHz?) 6502 and 32KB RAM which was supposed to compute the primes up to one million. As I recall, it took longer to print them out than it did to compute them, ... but I don't recall it taking that much longer than a few minutes, ... And I didn't win the prize, so clearly it could be done faster than I managed.
I did try quite hard though, because the prize was a Torch Z80 processor expansion box that would have made the BBC much more useful, especially for graphics. I was into 3D graphics and, on the BBC, if you had a reasonably hi-res graphics display then that only left two or three KB for your program and data. I had to work quite hard to render 3D images, and I wanted to do proper hidden-line removal which I never managed in 2KB of BASIC!
Maybe it was this experience which gave me a morbid fear of anything in maths to do with prizes. See Conway's Rope Trick.
I remember entering an 'Acorn User' competition when I was a kid, and you had to write a program for a BBC Micro with a 2MHz (or maybe it was 1MHz?) 6502 and 32KB RAM which was supposed to compute the primes up to one million. As I recall, it took longer to print them out than it did to compute them, ... but I don't recall it taking that much longer than a few minutes, ... And I didn't win the prize, so clearly it could be done faster than I managed.
I did try quite hard though, because the prize was a Torch Z80 processor expansion box that would have made the BBC much more useful, especially for graphics. I was into 3D graphics and, on the BBC, if you had a reasonably hi-res graphics display then that only left two or three KB for your program and data. I had to work quite hard to render 3D images, and I wanted to do proper hidden-line removal which I never managed in 2KB of BASIC!
Maybe it was this experience which gave me a morbid fear of anything in maths to do with prizes. See Conway's Rope Trick.
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