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."

Comments

Influence of memory?

[arvindn]

For clarification: to ensure that the CPU (or platform) is the dominant influence on the overall performance, we fitted all systems with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP display adapter and 512 MB of RAM.

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.

Re:Influence of memory?

[Max Romantschuk]

shouldn't memory bandwidth and latency be good enough to ensure that CPU is the dominant factor

Memory bandwidth and latency are determined by the CPU in a vast majority of the platforms tested. For example: take an Atlhon with a 200MHz bus... Fit it with DDR400. No matter what is it going to be able to access all that extra bandwidth, since the CPU bus is saturated. Thereby, the CPU becomes the dominant factor even when taking those factors into account.

I'm sure there are exceptions, so feel free to point them out ;)

Re:Where's Cyrix?

[Ed Avis]

No, Cyrix was sold to VIA, but VIA isn't using the Cyrix design any more. They released a chip based on the Cyrix stuff originally, but it sucked. Then they bought Centaur as well, and the current VIA C3 is based on Centaur's WinChip family and made by the same design team.

You must be awfully young...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Where did they get that P-100?

[setzman]

Simple. Probably used one of the later Socket 7 (or "Super Socket 7") boards which supported Socket 5/7 processors and often had AGP slots. I think you're right about not having these machines in 1994 though.

cpu is only a small part of system perf.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.