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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.
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?
video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes.
;)
There is an old theory to do with penis size...
For the record, I am running a 286
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.
Prediction: This discussion will end up with someone wittering on about punch cards, paper tape, and front panel access to core memory.
Then someone else will recall the Dilbert cartoon where the engineer boasts "I made a database entirely out of zeros because we had no ones".
Oh, damn, done it myself.
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.
"65 CPUs that were overclocked from 100 mhz to 3.06 ghz"?? I know I certainly did...
Tom's Hardware brings you this startling revelation: Newer processors are faster than older processors!
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
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.
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.
THG
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.
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.
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.
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.
You forgot to mention their site layout:
Newer. (Click next)
Processors. (Click next)
Are. (Click next)
Faster. (Click next)
Than. (Click next)
Older. (Click next)
Processors. (Click next)
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
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)
I didn't know a P4 3.06Ghz CPU was noticably faster than my P100 in OpenGL. I guess it's time to upgrade my Quaking machine!
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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!
"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.
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
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.
C:\>
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
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
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
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
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
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.