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Comment by jmisavage | Hacker News Reader

What about Porsche with their Turbo trim EV? Turbo, Pro, whatever are just being used to denote something better like plus and premium used to do.

Besides aren't most professional things labeled Enterprise now anyway?

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No, Pro and Enterprise are different directions. Usually Enterprise requires communication or interconnection or scalability, Pro is just fine for single user mode. For example you can have a Pro digital camera (like DSLR was initially), but not an Enterprise one; in the same time you can have the Enterprise license of a tool that is just a mass version of the regular tool with a license manager added on top.

I mean, with Porsche the "Turbo" just means "the faster model" nowadays. After all, even the non-Turbo badged ones usually have a turbocharged engine in them.

We had turbo buttons on PC's years ago, most of them did nothing.

They always did something; the Turbo button was switching the CPU frequency on older PC's that ran software with no speed auto-dectection and adjustment. On IBM PC XT the turbo button was switching between 4.77 and 9.54MHz, on AT it was 8-12 or ever 16 MHz. They were needed on faster computers because some games were otherwise unplayable at the higher frequency. You may have had a turbo button on a PC case that was not connected to anything, that is a different story. If you put a 486 in a case from a XT the turbo button "not working" is your fault only.

>They always did something

No, many did nothing. I remember pulling PC's apart to find the switches not connected to anything.

A button not connected to the motherboard is not a fault of the button, but the builder of that computer, is it?

I had a Turbo button on a 80386, I believe it brought it down from 25 MHz to 12 MHz. I think they were still common on 486s too though, it wasn't until Pentiums that the option stopped being included.

So the question is.....why weren't those machines running at the higher frequency in the first place? Why would you only enable the turbo mode to play games but no to work in Excel?

On AT computers you had to go to low frequency to play games built for XT's. For example M1 Abrams tank simulator was a slideshow on a XT at 4.77, slow but almost playable on 9.54, fine on a AT at 12 MHz and unplayable on a 386 at 40 MHz (it was like a movie played on 10x speed). On the 386 with turbo off (16 MHz) was playable.

It's actually the other way around. You'd have to disable the Turbo to play the games. Because they where synchronized to the slower cpu clock frequency. For your spreadsheets you would use Turbo. Marketingwise it mirght make more sense to have a button to make your computer faster instead of one that makes it slower.

The games were unplayable at the higher frequency, presumably because they made some sort of assumption about the relation between clock speed and play speed. Typically the computer was on "turbo" all the time.

The turbo button made the machine slower for compatibility with older programs, as described in the parent post.

Energy efficiency/consumption would be my first thought.

Don’t those Porsches literally have turbochargers added to them? Hence the name upgrade. If so, I feel like that’s more accurate naming.

Not if it's an EV

Ah, thanks, missed the EV part. That makes sense and is quite funny.

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