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65 CPUs From 100 MHz to 3066 MHz
socram writes " Tom's Hardware posted an interesting article, describing and benchmarking 65 kinds of CPUs from 1994 to 2003. Opinions on what constitutes "adequate computing speed" vary greatly from one user to the next. While one person may be perfectly content with an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode", there is another group at the other end of the scale - video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes."
What about the 90Mhz I got under my desk right now, doesn't that get a mention?
"I kill you! You no good 56'ing!"
And how many people are going to read the article and keep on screaming about how "their" platform is "the best".
Gotta love "Betamax vs VHS" arguments.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
a Z80 used to be good enough for Ms. Pacman, the best game ever!!
Going through your own stash of parts and Misc. stuff, how many of these processors can you dig up?
I've managed to dig up an 8086, 286, 386, 2x 486 66's, 2 486 DX4 100's, P75, P100, 2x P133, Celeron 333, Celeron 400, PIII 450, and an Athalon 1800+....
it's a small list, but shows a good history of computing power in itself.
Zro
Genius to some, Madman to most.
Use the correct tool for the job; if a pen and notebook or binder will do, use it. No need to use hours and hours to set up a membership database if your club comprises 20 members and have a meeting every first Thursday of the month...
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes.
;)
There is an old theory to do with penis size...
For the record, I am running a 286
I think we've finally seen over the last year or so the point where the OSs and apps *can't* get any more bloaty: and so sales have plateaued. You don't need anything more than, say, a 600mhz machine for Office, internet, email and just about anything a home user might want to do apart from 3d gaming (and you've got a ps2 or xbox for that, right?). This is a Good Thing.
Prediction: This discussion will end up with someone wittering on about punch cards, paper tape, and front panel access to core memory.
Then someone else will recall the Dilbert cartoon where the engineer boasts "I made a database entirely out of zeros because we had no ones".
Oh, damn, done it myself.
Just because I have an old machine doesn't mean I can't make productive use of it. All right, I can't do gaming, but my Pentium 333 machine suffices for everything else. Just make sure you have enough memory to run everything comfortably without swapping. Heck, I'm even running a webserver on it.
"65 CPUs that were overclocked from 100 mhz to 3.06 ghz"?? I know I certainly did...
I would much rather have a lot of memory with a crappy CPU, than a state of the art CPU with crappy memory.
Dammit, get off the web server while I check the benchmarks. :-)
Were running a webserver after we're through with it.
Tom's Hardware brings you this startling revelation: Newer processors are faster than older processors!
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Something that the business industry already knew? Most companies are not running out and buying the latest and greatest computers for their offices. Why? No need. Why does Bob the data entry clerk need a 3ghz machine with a TI4600 and 2 gigs of ram on an asus board? He can probably do his job fine on a 600mhz machine or less and companies know this. Guess what, Bob has a 600mhz machine if hes lucky or if thats the min requirement for his Excel spreadsheet.
You might want to try this link http://216.239.39.120/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://w ww.de.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/index.html&pre v=/search%3Fq%3Dtomshardware%2Bcpu%2Bde%26hl%3Den% 26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8
its a Google translation of the German THG page so far its working ok
OAM
We have an old Pentium 133 here setup as the ISDN router. Works perfectly! Also got a DHCP and DNS-cache on it.
Heck, a 486 could do all that!
Wait a minute, surely size isn't the only parameter of the memory that matters? Sure, you have to ensure there's no swapping (if you don't your benchmarks are sure to be totally screwed), but apart from that shouldn't memory bandwidth and latency be good enough to ensure that CPU is the dominant factor? Here is a nice article on this.
THG
I've recently put together three boxen for family and friends from my spares pile. We're talking 120-150Mhz PIs, 48-64MB SIMM RAM, 1GB drives, quad speed CD-ROMs, 56K modems and 1MB S3 cards, with Win98SE, Word 97, Outlook Express and not much else.
Now, to me and thee, that spec sucks, but to someone that just wants a box for email, browsing and word processing, it does everything that they need to do, as fast as they need to do it.
Sure, I like being able to buy 3Ghz monsters, but you need to sell a lot of systems to make back the the cost of the R&D for them. And given that we should all be aware by now of the environmental cost of computer systems, I'm going to be keeping "obsolete" hardware in service just as long as I can, and thumb my nose at the marketeers who tell me that there are compelling reasons to upgrade other than the magic smoke getting out.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"...video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes."
What do you mean "video fans"?
People who enjoy watching moving pictures certainly don't need any gigaherz. They need a DVD player or a Pentium III 500 with the DivX codec.
its the typical tomshardware review.
"We were unable to conduct any detailed benchmark testing.".
yeah right, lets use some windows benchmark joke to compare 486/p1 cpu speeds. i really wonder what this icomp index printed on the cpu is good for if you cant run windows xp... what an asshat.
personally it anoys me when morons with too much money buy an amazing spec computer and cable/dsl to use it just for chatting on msn and checking email from time to time. a ~200mhz machine would be perfect for them to do such things. as a power user (coding, compiling, 3d rendering, music production, etc) i need quite high spec machines, yet i cannot afford one. :)
i propose a scheme to give crap spec computers to people with no use for such power in exchange for their uber-machines to go to people that need them.
problem solved
or perhaps charging minimal cost for computers but specs are given out on a need basis. crap people get crap, cheap machines and the more needy users get the powerful beasts.
due to the law of averages costwise this would mean each person gets the speed of computer they need for minimal cost.
there is another group at the other end of the scale - video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes."
There's an old saying, if you sit down at the poker table and don't know who the sucker is, it's you. Any gamer would be better off saving some money on CPU and spending it on graphics card, memory and SCSI disks. The PC architecture is so unbalanced that the only thing a top-end CPU is good for is boasting about.
Ummm.... this's been really informative. Obviously the moderator haven't heard it so far. Maybe I should also get some crack ;)
Now for more vaguely interesting benchmarks (extending back to the early 70's, and not a single x86-clone in sight) see this alt.folklore.computers thread. A real historical perspective would have to go back to the 1940's.
Granted it's dead now, but they once stood much like AMD today as a alternative to Intel CPUs. They even started the trend to call CPUs not by its clock (MHz), but by it's "P-rating", roughly how it benchmarked against Intel CPUs.
Anyone else noticed that contrary to what AMD would like you to believe by the 3000+ model naming, the intel pentium 4 3.06Ghz performed mcuh better than AMD 3000+ in every benchmark.
What's under yellowstone?
now i have an xp2100+ working on an Asus A7V333 with 512mb ddr, and a Radeon 8500. 17' samsung monitor
;)
nice one eh? but this because i do video processing and some 3d modeling... And of course gaming, you gotta see unreal2 on that
i first had a 486dx2, then a p 133, p200, then i had a k62 350, then a k6500, and i keep it until xp1600+ came out, and now 2100. And i think i'll not change this in a very few years... overcloking is the key now...
My parents, believe or not, have been using a 486SX running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 since 1994. They run some invoicing and Word 2.0 and it runs quite fast for that purpose. "Why do I need a faster computer?" my father asks. "The invoices won't print any faster, will they? "
I showed them Win98 on my laptop. They hated it.
They forgot the Pentium Pro, Xeon cpus, and the winchip. As someone else mentioned as well, cyrix.
Also forgot the 486SX (worth forgetting). BTW the celeron came AFTER the PII.
...and it gets to the Slashdot frontpage.
Have you ever run DOS 6.22 on a P133? It's blazing fast. If you must run a DOS app, it would almost be folly to run it on anything more than a P133! Of course, the P133 was not the processor of DOS's heyday; the 80386 was. By the time of the P133, the industry had already begun to migrate to Win95 (or OS/2, or Linux, or you favorite OS - no flames needed here) :-)
in "real-time mode"
Sorry to pick nits on Slashdot, but you probably meant "real mode", though I could be wrong. Real-time and real mode are very different animals.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
is doing fine with a 130MHz Pentium with 32MB RAM. Video adapter has 1 megabyte of memory. I have the latest and the greatest version of FreeBSD on it. I work on console - don't even have X installed, and everything is LIGHTNING FAST and cool! I have a custom font 130x80 text screen and I use links (www), slrn (usenet), mutt (e-mail), mpg321 (mp3, internet radio). Why do I need a faster computer I ask! Someone showed me a Windows XP computer. I hated it. I am currently enjoying U2 live music MP3:s.
My guess is its faster memory, hard drive, and buss speeds is what really makes the newer systems so much faster when doing things like ripping mp3's. I find it hard to believe that the actual cpu itself is x100 slower. It may also show why wintel and lintel pc's are taking over the unix workstation market. Traditionally only unix workstations had good i/o but this is now changing.
I assumed these x100 and x80 performance gains would be between something like a 8086 and a PIV. Not from hardware I used back only in 97-2001. You should see how long it takes to load kde3 on it.
http://saveie6.com/
You forgot to mention their site layout:
Newer. (Click next)
Processors. (Click next)
Are. (Click next)
Faster. (Click next)
Than. (Click next)
Older. (Click next)
Processors. (Click next)
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
Here is what I use at home:
I kid you not. =)
It's pathetic, I know.
Now, from the list above, can you guess:
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
you insensitive clod!
I didn't know a P4 3.06Ghz CPU was noticably faster than my P100 in OpenGL. I guess it's time to upgrade my Quaking machine!
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
what's the point in adding them to the list if there is no benchmark of them? Hilarious that they want to install winxp on them.. 'course it doesnt work, DUH! i would love to see a win98-winxp comparison on a P100..
Anyway I am in constant search of these lower speed processors 'cause they are perfect for mp3-players and control jobs! in combination with win98lite it's perfect!
Running DOS on a pentium? Blasphemy. That's what a 486 is for.
It would be interesting to see how Alphas compare with Intel and AMD CPUs.
1: the benchmarks are crap.
.net and Java are moving towards, .net and Java are being used for services and macros and those are the things that I will notice the speed up in.
Do I care if it takes 0.00001 secs instead of 0.0001 secs to find the first search match in a word document. Nope. infact, the small breaks I get because it takes a while for my PC to do things help my productivity(I get chance to think and relax a bit).
Proper bench marks should use a profiling JIT compiler, that recompiles the code optimally for the system your running based on profile data.
Why, because this is what
I have a reasonably quick PC with two sound cards and a crap GFX card, I don't play games but I do like mixing music, two sound cards are more important than an uber-fast pc, i could even use two slower PC's if i wanted to.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I could see another step forward in processor speed demand coming once they achieve a user-friendly voice interface woven into the OS. It'd be cool to have such a PC in the kitchen, for example, where you could just have a flat panel display and a microphone hanging from a cabinet (wireless keyboard and mouse could be kept nearby in a drawer or something). Voice recognition has come along pretty well in recent years, so it's not out of the question...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
"Opinions on what constitutes "adequate computing speed" vary greatly from one user to the next. [One] person may be perfectly content with an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode"
You're just as guilty of diminishing the usefulness and power of old computers. You forget what those computers did in their day. Did a Pentium 133 typically run real-mode DOS programmes? No, you have to go back a few more years. I have a Pentium 166 running NT4 with IE6 and Office 97, which is far more sophisticated than any DOS programme. It does it very well.
Then there's my network server that also does web and mail for the internet too. It's a P75 and running Debian 3.
Performance of old computers doesn't deteriorate with time. They still run the programmes of a few years ago just as well. They even run some of the programmes of today too.
If you had said "286" instead of "Pentium 133", I might have accepted your comment.
As it happens, he did. He just claims he was talking about something else.
I don't remember many P100's that could take more than 128MB of memory, let alone 512MB and have an AGP socket, and as far back as 1994 too? My two Pentiums here at home won't take memory chips of greater than 32MB, and those chips aren't easy to get either. In fact one of them is supposed to take 128MB max, but it wouldn't boot with it, so it's running 96MB. Where did they get that machine on the first page of the review? How hard did they have to dig for it?
What I'd rather see than benchmarks, is an overview of the most common architectures (ia32, sparc, 680x0/ppc/alpha/mips - incl. mobile version) lets say, from early 486 up to now, of the max. energy consumtion each CPU uses/d.
For a home user, whos 24/7 server/firewall usually does not need the latest and greatest, energy is a cost factor, and when buying that used machine for that purpose, this would really make a difference. IMHO.
Having just figured out, that my PPro-200 uses slightly more energy than my PII-350.
I often end up going to client/Parent/Relative/Friend/Friends Parents sites to fix their computers where they may have something pretty hoss and when I ask them what their processor is, they say "Windows" or "20 Gigawhatsits" when I ask them how much memory they had. So, I thought nobody would ever notice if I just sort of upgraded my machine sequentially with bits from their machines - like traded my 1.8 with their 2.0, which I'd trade with a 2.2 at the next site or something. They'd never notice, right? Who's the poorer for it? Sigh. Stupid morals.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
First of all, you probably mean "real mode" and not "real-time mode".
Second, a Pentium 133 MHz, while by no means fast by modern standards, is more than sufficient to run multi-tasking operating systems. PC processors have been since the 386, but it took Microsoft until the Pentium before they actually bothered to release a 32-bit operating system for normal users.
When people talk about DOS programs, I think about 286s. When people talk about running DOS programs other than games on a Pentium, I feel like crying.
And as a disclaimer, I'm not a long-time PC-user, just someone who actually remembers history. My first PC was a Pentium, and I bought it in order to run FreeBSD.
...Taco wins easily with an astounding 94 mn delay before reposting that exact same story.
I'm impressed...
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Twice!
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
Hmph... x86 cpus, lots and lots of x86 cpus and nothing else.
:)
There were much more interesting (and way faster) cpus coming out around the time of the P5.
I can understand them doing it this way, what with the ease of benchmarking (although they even had problems with that, cpus returning 0) but the fact that I can't recall a single non-X86 article on Tom's hardware might have been more of an influence on them than the practical difficulties of benchmarking.
That it completely misses out a generation of cpus (Pentium 2) is also mildly annoying.
Admittedly though, seeing 3Dmark run on a Pentium 100 was quite fun
Looking the the specs of your cobbled-up machines, I think they'll be fine except I would recommend getting at least 128 MB of RAM installed. Windows 98/98SE runs very well indeed with 128 MB installed because the OS doesn't swap to hard disk virtual memory so often, which speeds up performance quite a bit (sometimes as much as 100% over the original setup!).
We've donated most of my older systems; I never throw away a working CPU. Most go to my parents (who still have the old family Kaypro II running on CP/M!). I just turned over to my Dad the oldest machine in my fleet, a 233MHz Pentium MMX box. He's using it for his electronics lab.
We've also donated older computers to poor activists in various social causes.
The lowest-end system at Coyote Gulch is a 400MHz Celeron laptop, which my wife uses for web browsing and e-mail.
Come to think of it, my Sun Ultra 10 is running a 300MHz UltraSparc IIi.
Old boxes can be upgraded and kept going for a very long time. My primary Windows box is currently an 800MHz Pentium III; it began life as 400MHz Pentium II. I keep upgrading the video card and the processors; it still does a very nice job of connecting me to the Microsoft universe. The Radeon 9000 Pro video card lets me run Morrowind and other "high end" games acceptably.
Of course, Linux gets the best machines. I recently acquired a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 system with RDRAM, and it's never been sullied by Windows. I use it for software development and number crunching, so the horsepower is important.
My other Linux box, though, is a constantly-upgraded dual 600MHz Pentium III system. It began life as a uniprocessor IBM workstation at 400MHz... in its current configuration, it is my main machine for long-run simulations. I may upgrade it one more time to dual 1.2GHz Celerons.
"Obsolete" is in the mind of the beholder. Look at the charts on Tom's site, and you'll see that the latest processors are *not* as fast as you might expect from comparing MHz numbers.
Consumer culture convinces us that we need something that we don't. While some of us can use the power of the 3GHz processor, the masses have no need for such a beast. This is one major reason the PC industry has slowed so dramatically -- people who have working systems see no need to upgrade. They're smart in tight times, because, for them, there is no reason to upgrade.
Still, in a society where bigger is better, folls will keep running out the door to buy the latest and greatest, if only to be "bigger" than their neighbors.
All about me
CPU's go out of date so quickly that there's even a new version of this /. article out already!
Web serving is probably the least CPU-intensive thing I do with my machines. I've done it on a 486-33. I'm sure you have better examples of making use of your P-333. For instance my fastest workstation is a P2-350 which is fine for watching (most) movies with software decoding.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
All of your machines have at least 128 MB of system RAM installed.
CNET.com did an article online a couple of years ago talking about the cheapest way to quickly increase performance for your computer. Their conclusion: get more RAM installed first. Easy to understand why--with more RAM installed, any operating system will dramatically lower their need to use hard disk space for virtual memory swapping, which can in some cases increase system performance as much as 100 percent.
My home machine runs a slow-by-2003 standard Celeron A 500 MHz CPU, but because the machine has 320 MB of system RAM installed both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 Professional run reasonably quick because both versions of Windows has very little need to do virtual memory paging on the hard drive.
This will be a dupe of a future article.
The first problem with the benchmarks is that all of the systems had 512 MB of RAM. While that's the best way to gauge raw CPU power, the problem is that very few systems had anything near that level of power. IIRC, I spent somewhere between $50 and $100 USD back in 1998 for 64 megs -- outfitting a PC with 512 megs would have been prohibitively expensive. While it's nice to look at the benchmarks as a "best case" scenario, older CPUs would have performed much worse due to swapping.
Also, while the Pentium II is mentioned in Intel's history, it's not in the benchmarks. The Celeron used the same core, but with a differnt L2 cache setup (2nd generation Celerons had 128 KB at full CPU speed, while the P2 had 512 KB at half CPU speed).
The main reason to buy a new cpu is to do something you COULDN'T do before.
Many people upgraded to 386 to run win31. Not so many went for the 486. Again to use win95 and play let's say mp3 you needed a Pentium. so many people upgraded to pentium.
(notice that i am talking about upgrades, not all those people that bought NEW computers at the time).
Still P-100 was ok for almost anything, nobody upgraded to P-200, or even P-MMX when they came out. But you can't watch movies on a Pentium ( well, maybe a pentium 233 MMX) and those old soyo's didn't come with USB support (not before the MMX family again). So everybody rushed for P-II's.
At this point , you can do (almost) anything a P-4 3 Ghz does on a simple celeron 333. There is no need to upgrade. Since 1999 we are still waiting for the next killer app. (Games? yeah, sure)
Till them my poor celeron, with 768 MB of really cheap RAM and my faithfull G400 will be just fine.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just ordered a Athlon 1700 to replace my 266. It's been long overdue but when I researched the motherboard, I found many people upgraded on the 0's (from a 1000 to a 2000, 2000 to 30000). I always wait until the performance doubles. Thus far, that has not happened with the 1700's. And the 1700 was $50.
So my rationale is that I will upgrade when the performance doubles and I will get a chip that I can get cheap, like the 1700. And I always get a new motherboard because they add so much cool stuff (like USB 2.0 and Firewire and video and sound). I got a new motherboard with 5 channel sound and video onboard for $60. So I go from a 266 to a 1700 for $110 with free shipping at Newegg. Righteous!
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Wow. 65 processors and not a single Motorola or IBM chip. And so the megahertz myth marches on, unchallenged...
Kevin Fox
can anyone explain how this is useful _at all_?
Your statement is flat-out untrue. Most current games are CPU-limited, even with the best video cards.
0
See this article on AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=165
In particular, the charts on this page that indicate that the GeForce4 Ti4600 scales up with CPUs all the way to the fastest CPU that was available when the article was written.
Faster graphics cards will only be further limited by the CPU, achieving a smaller percentage of their full potential.
The PC architecture is a little less imbalanced than you think. Spending extra money on a video card your CPU can't feed triangles too fast enough is a complete waste of money, too. Sucker.
surely this is one big wastage of time? We know
CPU speeds from their architecture and clockrates...
and also changes to the way the CPU and memory talk to each other are vitally important. also...what
about the infrastructure of the PC...eg a 2GHz with a crappy 4Gb IDE HD isnt going to run nicely...
a 1.4Ghz with 7200 UDMA133 30Gb disk is going to easily overtake.
couple this to the BLIND IGNORANCE that the only
CPU's out there are x86 and i find this article insulting!!!
where are the 040 and 060s? where are the 601,603,G3 and G4's? where are the Sparc's, the UltraSparcs, the EV6 and 7's ?
Me too. A 100 MHz machine with 512 MB memory is probably less annoying than a 2 GHz machine with 64 MB memory. Not that I have used a machine with either specs...
So, for an 18x increase in clock speed, they get a 26x improvement in performance. That means the number of instructions per clock has gone up by only a factor of two, at least for this application. That's not very impressive, considering how much extra hardware they've thrown at it over the years.
Lately, on of my friends (girl, actually) approched me saying that her dad wanted a new computer and had a 3.5k canadian pesos to put on it (about 2k US). I said no problem. He is a lawyer and couldn't tell a ps/2 ball mouse from a USB dual optical mouse. Anyway I built him a p4 2.56 with all the goodies and grabbed a 19" high res monitor. I set it all up for him and when I went to leave, happy that I made a happy fellow, he offered me his old computer, a k6-2 450. The moral of this story? I am sure that that k6-2, that is now my stp server at home(mp3, actually, only has 13.6 gig hard drive) is used more often and to it's full extent then the p4 he now has. He checks e-mails and does some browsing and VERY LITE photoshop. SO why, oh why, does he needs it? I could use that, but I made a computer in janurary that was 1k CND, about 600 US$, and it is a bomb. I enjoy working on it when I get home from school. And then I can drop my laptop and get serious. So tell me, do you have any rich people you built systems for? DO they use them to their full extent?
In Canada, we don't fancy things like socks
Actually, the Celeron A 300 MHz CPU is barely sufficient to do DVD playback--and that's assumming you have an ATI graphics card with the Rage 128 or Radeon chipset.
For decent all software DVD playback, it's probably better to get at least Celeron A 466 MHz CPU at minimum; given that WinDVD 4.0 and PowerDVD XP 4.0 support all the known CPU multimedia extensions (AMD's 3DNow! and 3DNow! Professional, Intel's MMX, SSE/SSE2), a Coppermine-core Celeron 566 MHz (which has both MMX and SSE extensions) is a more appropriate minimum CPU for decently smooth DVD playback.
With the right peripherals and supporting hardware, a Pentium 233MMX with Win98 is fine for office work, email, web browsing, and almost all non-3D games. Problem is, most old CPUs are coupled with old hard drives, old graphics cards, small memory footprints, etc. Clearly there are some things you simply cannot do without adequate cpu power, but a great many people never do anything from that list.
I'm running Windows 2000, SQl Server Desktop, and Office 2000, and Visual Studio .NET on an old Compaq Deskpro 2000 P166 and it's just dandy.
Actually the bootup and login times are atrocious but after that everything is quite acceptable. This is my main work machine - I do real (ie. it's my day job) MS Access, VB and C# development.
Sure the thing would be useless if I left its original 32MB RAM as it was. But all it took to turn this dinosaur into a good working machine was 384 MB RAM and a more modern hard disk. The CPU clock speed doesn't hold me back at all.
PS. Great for Age Of Empires, bad for any recent 3D splat-fest you can name.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Hell I do most my work from my old Pentium 133MMX Fujitsu Laptop w/D-Link 802.11b (22mbps is noticably faster than 11mbps from my Airport Card) from my bedroom. Textpad, SCP are all I need. Although the apps I'm working on (from my laptop) are all web based so I guess it depends on your platform.
I cannot understand how anyone who is good at what they do cannot afford the equipment that makes them better at their job. Sounds like a brick mason trying to get a builder to use him for his house but saying he needs to borrow the tools. It just doesn't fit.
Besides if you're really doing 3D rendering, coding, etc... for a living it's a perfect time to take a break while you're compiling/rendering your code/scene.
NINNLE Linux runs on anything, from the lowest 386 right on up to the latest P4. You can't beat NINNLE!
There are even ports for M68K, Alpha and 6502!
NINNLE forever!
The thing that drives me batty about Tom's Hardware is that he spends hours and hours running all these benchmarks and then presents his data in the most asinine way. He has 65 data points on a slew of scales and all he can think of to represent this is a dozen bar charts. Yippee.
Tom, how about a scatter plot comparing release date with performance? Or a line plot comparing Intel's top performance with AMD's over the years? Maybe put the theoretical Moore's law curve in there for comparison too. The gentle sloping curve of your performance-sorted bar chart is meaningless. It's a waste of our time and yours.
Another example of Tom being a graph ass is last years printer roundup. He created one graph per printer per group of scales. So we get to compare the hp deskjet's speed at standard resolution with it's maximum motor speed, but we can't compare the speed with that of the canon i850 without flipping back and forth to a different page.
What a waste of good data.
Erik
Realtime refers to time-critical systems where validity of result doesn't only depend on its correctness but also at the time it arrives.
Realmode, otoh, is one of the modes the x86 CPUs operate in. In real mode, system operates in 16 bit mode, only base 1024K memory is available & there is no (real) multitasking possible. The mode used by all modern multitasking operating systems is 32 bit protected mode. In this special mode, the notion of "kernel mode" and "user mode" comes up.
Whether typo or mis-information, but such big mistake should never be there at least on front-page of slashdot, which claims to be premiere geek portal
- mritunjai
Go get a suitable DX4-100mhz overdrive chip and plonk it it. They won't know themselves it'll be so much faster. Only 1 or 2$ 2nd-hand.
Also, since it probably has 4mb of ram, ponk another 4 to 16mb in, and it'll be much much faster too.
They do equal more capabilities. Go ahead and try realtime audio work on your system. Start with something simple, a peice with 8 stereo tracks and some simple effects, maybe 1 EQ per track and an overall reverb. That will kill your system, never mind if you tried to setup a complecated project.
Or what about something a little more simple, say MPEG-4 playback? Try and playback broadcast quality MPEG-4 (720x480, 30i couple megabits/second). Not happening on that system. Worse still if you were to try something with HDTV specs.
Now, if the system works for you, great. By all means, use what works for you and don't spend money on more power if you don't need it. HWOEVER recognise that there are plenty of applicaitons (more every day) aside form games that demand more power than a system like that has. The continual increase power is not a pointless thing.
The odd thing is, despite the speed increase, the performance is less between the fastest and slowest in some cases
OpenGL: MHz *30.6 ; frames *24.4
DirectX: MHz *18.4 ; score *16.5
And the reverse in others
MP3 encding: MHz *30.6 ; time *108
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I see a duplicate post in your future.
The other day I had occasion to boot a Win95 machine (complete Netware 4.11 networking, IP, printers, etc) and was blown away by how fast it booted.
It was on a PII450, but still, even high end PIII systems take double that amount of time to boot 2K and XP.
Just save a set amount every month and when you reach your goal buy what you want. That way you're not tied to the "latest and greatest" you will achieve your own goals.
Continue to save even after you've purchased your new computer (for the next cycle). I did this in college, my first computer a Pentium 133 was $2483 and I saved for a year and a half to get it. The funny thing is when I began saving the fastest you could get was a Pentium 90 and they were around $3500. As I saved prices drop and technology improves. I know this is common sense but saving for what you want is better than wasting 19.8% on a credit card or MBNA "loan". Plus setup a company for your outside work and write off your expenses. I make about 60k/year in contracts (in addition to my full time job) so I write off everything work related. If you're learning and don't have contracts you can still expense your stuff. If your tax bracket is 12% (fed) it's like getting 12% of what you buy for free. It saves me 30%+ on taxes annually.
Sysmark 2002 Benchmark
I thought similarly numbered Athlons were supposed to be as fast as similarly numbered Pentiums? (ie, 2400+ = 2.4Ghz, 2800+ = 2.8GHz, etc, etc)
Even more striking is the comparison between the "(Thoroughbread) DDR333 Athlon 2400+" and the "(Thoroughbread) DDR333 Athlon 2100+". Sysmark is reporting the exact same performance (158)! Granted, it's only one application, but Tom seems to think it's relevant ;)
Too bad there isn't a stability and heat dissipation comparison.
Don't buy them the fastest hardware!!!!!!
If you do it, it will be an excuse to software companies (and lazy programers) to release even more bloated software!!!!!
ww.
Seriously, there are too many people who don't know squat about their new hardware. Either they didn't research enough or don't really care. They just want to know they're set, secure, and sexy.
/. community will bitch and complain why don't they use the alternative, which will end up being more work, cheaper, and confusing to all others but shows their true geekdom... hmm.. kind of like a gearmonkey and his modified roadster.
It's the same in the automotive world. A daily commuter who travels only 10 mins on smooth steady roads, does not need a 4x4 350hp behemouth sportcar/suv. But they'll get it anyway b/c it's the new hottness.
Same with a person who only checks mail, surfs the web doesn't need a 3ghz machine with HT and 2 gigs of ram.
At both instances, they'll treat their machines like crap, not maintain either, and the moment it shows weakness, slows down or chokes, they'll call it a piece of sh*t and go out and get the next best model.
It's an endless cycle...
While the
Therefore we conclude that god is most likely irrational and imaginary. QED.
PS - I'm an atheist anyway, so this argument is strictly for shits and giggles. He's quite definitely imaginary.
[FUCK BETA]
the Intel Pentium 100 takes two hours, nine minutes to encode a music file from WAV to MP3 format (our test file is 17 minutes, 14 seconds long).
I wonder if it is Ravel's Bolero, which is exactly the song I am listening to now, when I read the text. Although this version is not 17:14 long (a couple of minutes less than that) I remember seeing a "complete performance" of it that was just 3 or 5 seconds longer than 17:14.
Could also be a Pink Floyd song, maybe?
tmegapscm
A few years ago, I bought 3 Dells with Pentium 133s from a company that was upgrading, for $85 each. Non-expandable 32MB RAM, with 810MB hard disk. Resold one, gave another to my preschoolers to bang on, and set the third up as a test server: SuSE Linux was too tight a fit, so I installed FreeBSD (text shell of course), Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It's dandy for learning *nix and testing code. And when I route port 80 to it, I can read the logs and see all the squibs the script kiddies are throwing at Windows boxes.
As I recall, the Pentium processor got slower as the ram increased over 128mb. Something to do with the caching strategy. The 486 had a similar problem somewhere between 16 and 32mb.
Tom's test system had 512mb of ram. That should more or less knock the pentium's performance down to the equivalent of having turned off the cache entirely.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Of course you can game. Delta Force. Half Life-Counterstrike-Team Fortress Classic. Quake I/II. Warcraft II. Age of Kings/The Conquerors. Civilization II. Just because it isn't the latest does not make it any less fun or valid to play. IMHO, many of these games are far more entertaining than their more recent iterations. For example, Final Fantasy VI (SNES) compared to Final Fantasy X (PS2). The only real problem is with Civ 2, where if you get deep in the game turns may take a while without a burly processor, but its like having a commercial break to grab a snack and use the bathroom...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I have to insert a comment here on the type of CPUs that were benchmarked. They were all x86 compatible CPUs. The flaws of the x86:
Limited, assymetric instruction set.
Small number of registers. Also assymetric in their use.
Adding new features usually meant extending the instruction set in strange ways, adding even more 'special case' registers.
What I'd like to see would be a good benchmark comparison between other similarly sucessful CPUs.
The 68k and PowerPC series come to mind. Curiously, although the 68k had a much cleaner architecture (at least conceptually) the designers never managed to make it run significantly fast (went up to 60Mhz bus-speed. I think internal speed was 120Mhz).
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
But you forgot the last bit:
{Summary}
Newer. Processors. Faster. Older.
I have been always a hardware junkie, and as one of many, i have in my "closet" (thats now a room) filled with old cabinets, motherboards, soundcards and alike old-and-dusty equipment.
One day I said "Do I really need a FAST PC to live?",an later "hey, lets reassemble one of those" and i cramped a 16bit soundcard, 100mbps ethernet and a 1.6gig hd to a pentium 166 mobo with 40megs of ram.
Partitioned and Installed(tm) linux and windows95b, tunned the OSs and played mp3s very fine, played Age of empires, browsed internet pretty well and eventually served as a proxy for my house lan.
The PC finally ended as a car mp3 player inside a small cardboard box in my trunk.
The question is: Do we really need Powerfull but Expensive Computers to do what we are used to do on them?
as a side note, check overcaffeinated.net webcomic. Its yet another pretty fun geek comic.
Pedro Meza - Mafufo.com
I worded my post poorly at the beginning. Faster video cards obviously scale better with CPU speed.
However, if you look at the chart, you'll find that even the midrange GF4 Ti4200 scales all the way up to the fastest CPU speed they tested. The lowly GF4MX cards do not scale as well at high detail, although in the medium detail chart, even the low-end cards can be seen pushing all the way out to the edge of the CPU scale.
My only point was that it is a balancing act, and it's not always the graphics card's fault. If your system is imbalanced, fix the slow part, be it CPU, video, RAM, disk, or whatever.
Even construing your assertion charitably, I have to disagree. There is a sweet spot for each component in a PC. Let's use NewEgg for a price check on the Athlon XP.
The Unreal Tournament 2003 numbers are with the current video champ, the Radeon 9700 Pro. Notice that they increase linearly with CPU speed (although not price, unfortunately).You can certainly argue that the $120 premium for the most expensive Athlon XP at NewEgg is not worth 20 FPS (i.e., 46% more expensive, compared to 11% faster). I agree. On the other hand, $120 will not buy you an upgrade from a 120 GB "special edition" IDE drive to a comparable SCSI drive. Even if you did spring for a 10,000 or 15,000 RPM SCSI drive, you would be unlikely to experience faster game play.
The problem with arguing that the PC architecture is unbalanced is that the game writers already know that. They limit texture detail, so that your main memory is barely a factor, let alone your hard drive. I recommend the following for a serious gaming system:
Tweak as desired.LinITX is about running Linux on VIA's Mini-ITX motherboards which use the BGA version of the C3 (soldered down rather than socketed).
The older boards use the PLE133 chipset & the newer "M" series use the same CLE266 as your board.
Warning that not only does i686 not work for C3 because of cmov, but the FPU in the Ezra parts runs at half the clock speed. The new Nehemiah parts will have full-speed FPU. The latest EPIA ME10000s boards at iDot (which were supposed to be Nehemiah) are just M9000s with 1GHz rather than 933MHz Ezras.
I recently replaced a 6 disk raid 10 setup with one
/dev/hde
/dev/hde:
wd800jb special edition. The speeds are nearly
identical. The scsi raid was great for letting 30
different disk intensive processes access it at the
same time with little to no slowdown. I can't get
away with the same amount of crap hitting the
wd800jb at the same time. For a personal
workstation, I no longer see the point in running
scsi. As a previous bigtime SCSI bigot, I've seen
the light. IDE has grown up as far as I'm
concerned.
vicious ~ # hdparm -t
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.61 seconds = 39.75 MB/sec
It still amazes me that's one disk.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
As another example, 3D accelerators, faster CPUs, and cheaper software have made digital content creation possible on the PC that, previously, would have required an unthinkable investment of resources for a solo artist. I'm no professional, but I've seen enough to know that even a $500 Quadro and a $2,000 Maya license is cheap, compared to a few years ago. For that matter, there was a pretty decent reader-submitted still in a recent issue of 3D World that was created with Blender and Photo-Paint.
People can be famously unimaginative:
- "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- "640 K ought to be enough for anybody."
Here's hoping we don't run out of uses for all those extra Hz and B."Programme" is outdated English. As American is the supreme dialect of English in today's world, it is appropriate to use it for all daily conversation throughout the world. Saying 'colour' 'programme' etc. just to be anti-American is asinine. Welcome to the third millennium, dumbass.
Is there any other slashdot page more appropriate for it to get?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Not sure if you've heard of this, but Id released a wonderful win32 port of Doom a few years back (Doom95 or some such). It runs just prefectly in NT and 2000, so I assume the DOS issues are non-existent. Then again, with some of what I've heard about XP, who knows.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Did anyone notice that the CPU on the Geforce 4 is considerably more powerful than the Pentium 100? Clearly what's needed here is a version of Linux that runs on the video card.
We are indeed living in strange times.
How come with all these processor improments, it still takes about a minute for me to boot Windows XP?
Those morons with too much money usually buy Compaqs and HPs. Would you trade your home made 200MHz machine for a shiny new Compaq? I know I wouldn't.
hey!
You need to pay better attention to gaim dickhead!
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
I wonder as a side. How much it cost Toms Hardware guide for all those Windows XP Licenses. After all they would need one for each CPU.
Patrick Havens (Mr. 573333 to you.) Graphic Artist / Coder / Father / Journeler
Correcting me is ok, but calling me names is a mark of a small mind.
I screwed up, but you did not show me the right path. You chose to be a flamer instead and look what it got you. Instead of being positive karma, you got a ding on your karma as well as a well deserved ding on my part. (I checked you out and you had a good string going until my post)
Be a teacher, not an asshole.
I still would like for somebody to please point me to the debunking of the quote.
Wings of OS/400:
The airline has bought ancient DC-3s, arguably the best and safest planes
that ever flew, and painted "747" on their tails to make them look as if
they are fast. The flight attendants, of course, attend to your every need,
though the drinks cost $15 a pop. Stupid questions cost $230 per hour,
unless you have SupportLine, which requires a first class ticket and
membership in the frequent flyer club. Then they cost $500, but your
accounting department can call it overhead.
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