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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.
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.
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)
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You may like my a cappella music
"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.
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:\>
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
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.