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."

Comments

going through your own stash...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Adequate speed

[Harald74]

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",

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...

old theory

[RobertTaylor]

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 ;)

moral of the story?

[RMH101]

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.

Re:moral of the story?

[Sheriff Fatman]

Granted. I don't see how any word processor can justifiably require a 1.6Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM. In fact, I think Office 97 on a Pentium Pro 200 was perfectly usable in it's day and is just as usable now, but that's not the whole story. There's a whole plethora of applications which are now commonplace, which weren't even considered feasible ten (?) years ago. I can remember a piece of DOS software on my old 286 which displayed JPEG images. That was it. It took noticeable time just to decode the file, and then sample it down to 320x200 to display on a normal VGA monitor. Nowadays, we don't even consider the decoding process when viewing JPGs.

There's other similar applications - DivX movies, strong encryption, even MP3 audio - which we now take for granted 'cos we've got so much horsepower to play with that processing overhead is no longer an issue. Now we're getting into the realm of PVRs, digital camcorders, encoding real-time video straight into DivX - applications which appeal to ordinary home users, and which require some *serious* megahertz. The games industry provides a convenient milestone - anyone can tell that Quake III looks better than the original Wolfenstein 3D, but more importantly, they can see that they're fundamentally the same thing. It's a lot harder to compare modern video editing software with that of ten years ago, because ten years ago the only people editing movies on their home PCs were masochistic millionaires.

Rather than focusing on all those wasted MHz driving more and more bloated word-processors, consider some of the things we just *couldn't* do with slower hardware, and wonder what we're going to be taking for granted ten years from now. :)

100 MegaHertz? You were lucky!

[Burb]

(Cue Monty Python Yorkshiremen Sketch)

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.

Which reminds me

[Rogerborg]

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.

486 good enough for some tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Thank you, Captain Obvious!

[Hanno]

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 forget how good old computers were

[Malc]

"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.

Take a statistics course!

[epukinsk]

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