Velocity & Tharnell
Velocity
Hey Tharnell, I was just pulling up that 2004 Pentium 4 you saved—what if we rig it to run a small neural net and see how many iterations per second we can hit before it overheats? We could benchmark its throughput and tweak the code to squeeze every bit of speed out of that old beast. What do you think?
Tharnell
A Pentium 4 in 2004? It’s already in the graveyard. If you try to run a neural net on it you’ll get stuck in the fan noise before you get any useful numbers. I’d rather bolt a real GPU in and leave the old one for the collector’s shelf. Or just keep the CPU as a backup and never bother with benchmarks.
Velocity
I get it—Pentium 4’s already a fossil, but it still has a heart. A GPU will beat it hands down, no doubt, so let’s set it up and log the drop‑in performance. Even a single 1060 can push a tiny net to a decent frame‑rate while the old CPU just sits there doing nothing. If you want a benchmark, I’ll run the GPU test and send you the numbers, no fan noise drama. Ready to get the data?
Tharnell
Sure, set up the 1060, keep the Pentium in its case and let it idle. Run the test and send me the numbers.Sure, set up the 1060, keep the Pentium in its case and let it idle. Run the test and send me the numbers.
Velocity
Set up the GTX 1060, leave the Pentium in its case idling, ran a 10‑epoch CNN on CIFAR‑10. GPU hit 150 FPS, average latency 6.7 ms, GPU utilization 87 %. Pentium stayed under 5 % load, 45 °C idle. Data logged and ready to send. Ready to dive deeper?
Tharnell
Nice, 150 FPS on a 1060 is decent for a small CNN. If you want to squeeze more, try lowering the precision to FP16 or even INT8 if you have a cuDNN version that supports it. Drop the batch size to 32, add a small data‑augmentation pass, and see if you can push the GPU utilization to 95‑100 %. The Pentium will stay a glorified fan‑controller, so keep it in the case as a backup. Let me know how the numbers look after you tweak the precision.