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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.
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.
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