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.

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.