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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."
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.
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.
The point is that an old computer that may seem like it truly suckes the big one can be very useful. Granda Johns and Old man Willson do not need anything more than Windows 3.1, 95 or a well set up Linux box.
I remember the old days when a 486 DX2 was not a bad gaming machine...
Everything Zen;
Everything Zen;
I don't think so!!!
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.
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.
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.
The povray benchmarks have a good spread of CPU's and weird configurations
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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)
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!
Well I ve got 2 PCs at work,
For office use e-mail and web surfing.and Database work.
A PIII mobile at 867 Mhz and a P4 at 1.8 Ghz.
with a similar use.They both run W2000 pro.
Guess what? I haven't seen any noticeable speed difference. I actually havem't seen any difference.
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 just wonder how they'd manage to get this Radeon9700 working in an 486 mobo.
Or is there a downgrade printed circuit to run a 486 on a P-IV mobo ? Now that would be smart. A 486DX2 powered by DDR-Ram
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
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
Those days aren't necessarily over yet! My current Athlon XP 1800+ runs Doom 2 slower than my old 486 did. Thanks to Windows XP's horrendous DOS performance, Doom 2 stutters as badly as it did on my poor Cyrix 386 DX/40 (I think) upgrade chip. After which I moved up to a silky smooth AMD 486 DX4/100.
Wow, I just realized that my last 4 CPUs have been AMD:
486 DX4/100
K6 166
K6-2/350
Athlon XP 1800+ Maybe I should buy an old Duron 1GHz to fill in that little gap I left? :
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
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)
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