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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."
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?
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.
The DHCP sever for Indiana University (40,000+ students) use to run on a 486 with linux. I don't know what they use now. Just shows what a box can do if you don't use a GUI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
Wow. 65 processors and not a single Motorola or IBM chip. And so the megahertz myth marches on, unchallenged...
Kevin Fox
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
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.