Not just on a semi-modern CPU. I used it on a Zipit Z2 (truly ancient PXA270 Arm SoC with 32 mb of RAM) that I was using as a Debian PDA, and it was a godsend. Probably a little slower, but when you only have 32 megabytes of RAM, that's really the bottleneck you care about.

(I don't think Debian will run with so little memory anymore.)