> Now I'm seeing it in peripheral devices that have, not one, but several independent SoCs, all running Linux, on one card. There's even been a recent remote code exploit on, ... an LCD panel.
I remember at one time I had on my desk a PC with an 80x86 CPU and an Ethernet card that had an 80(x+1)86 chip inside. I think x=0, but I'm not sure.
But the
3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box
was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a
thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With
telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive.
I find that difficult to believe. It seems too high by an order of magnitude. Another thing that doesn't get mentioned much is that classic mainframes had SRAM, so their memory bandwidth was enormous.