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The History Of Pentium
yootje writes "ArsTechnica is running a story about the history of the Pentium processor. It starts with the original Pentium back in 1993, but it also handles the Pentium II and III. The article goes deep about how the processors are designed and work."
F00FC7C8 ?
I remember exploding many systems running many OSes with that...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Really, who came up with the name "Pentium"?
It makes me feel old that they now have a histroy for things I was around for the beginning of.
I remember back in the day when my family got a brand new computer with this strange device called a Pentium...And it had Windows 95 installed! This was huge, considering our previous computer had a version of Windows from the mid-80's...Anyway, excuse the rant, it's what I think of when I hear "Pentium 1"
in my universities days, we used to read that 786 will come soon, and it will seperate the floating point processor from the main CPU. Did that ever happen?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Here are some other cool CPU reference sites:
www.sandpile.org
Sandpile lists electrical specs for lots of CPUs and has links to lots of CPU documents.
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm
Lots of info here about pinouts and electrical specs. I like this one because it lists the initial selling price for the CPUs as well.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Got this from the 'Link of the Day' from "The Inquirer". A good comparison of various architectures.
# AL PHA
http://www.microprocessor.sscc.ru/great/s5.html
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The reason Intel broke with tradition and gave this chip a non-numeric name is because numbers cannot be copyrighted/trademarked.
Anyone could sell a "586 Chip": competitive chip makers like AMD and Doritos.
They switched to Pentium so nobody else could use the name.
Ahhh, ArsTechnica ... what a refreshing way to start a Monday than to relive my geek heritage. I still have my first Pentium computer in my closet at home. Large paperweight, I presume, but it may still run Linux. I've been thinking of making a wall-mounted collection of all my used processors for posterity.
I could stand to forget about Win95 though ... (shudders). Nothing worse than having to reformat one's hard drive every 3-6 months!
Author also seems to believe that the P1 went up to 300Mhz, maybe with N2 cooling but I was under the impression it stopped at 233Mhz, with AMD taking SuperSocket 7 speeds to the 500Mhz mark
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
It starts with the original Pentium back in 1993, but it also handles the Pentium II and III.
You mean they're not the same chip, with various overclocking inhibitors enabled?
the article doesn't tell us when we should expect the Hexium.
Although I grew up on an Atari ST520, later upgraded to a 1040 (eleet) a Packard Bell-produced P60 with 8MB of RAM and a 420MB HD was my first computer, obtained in late 1993. Windows 3.11. Lotta fond memories, even if some of them involve a lot of cursing and head-scratching, most at Windows. Occasionally some weird piece of proprietary Packard Bell technology would rear its head but on the whole it wasn't too bad of a computer.
That computer was eventually donated to FreeGeek - I still have the Atari, though.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
Back in 1993
Was that sooooo long ago? I never had an original pentium, as I usually find the cost/performance not usually worth the upgrade and I therefore usually skip a processor generation or so.
- 8086 or was it 8088
- Mac II (i know, it's not a PC, but it kicked ass, and even though I don't have an apple now, I still believe that they are some very nice machines)
- 486 dx-2 66 (now that was a cool sounding name)
- Pentium II (300 mhz)
- Pentium 4 (1.7 & 3.2 Ghz)
Thing is, why do most of us need all of this power? The only thing that has really driven my upgrades has been the ability to play games. Excel worked fine on a PII (even usuing features most 'business' users don't like regression analysis, formulas, etc)Word processors worked fine as well, in fact I miss some of the older processors that didn't try to autoformat every damned thing
Web browsers as well
I know there are security issues with alot of older softwares, etc, but can't they produce a fast low cost computer, w/o all of the bloat. Then everyone could afford a decent computer to do 99.9% of the things they wan't to.
My cousin just bought a $2000 computer and all he want's to do is occasionally surf, rip mp3's and DVD's - could this be done on a pentium or pentium II platform.
Did, I go way offtopic, it's monday.
competitive chip makers like AMD and Doritos
"Doritos" is a trademark of the advanced chip-maker Frito-Lay Company. Jay Leno is their main number-cruncher spokesman.
Ah yes, the old original Pentiums... The things had terrible heat issues, and couldn't even do simple math! Despite all this, however, I still have my first Pentium chip (p150) sitting on a shelf at home. Some day I'll get sick of looking at it and take it out to the shooting range to "put it down".
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Does anybody have any information on the patents/trade secrets intel violated with the Pentium I. I had heard this mentioned that they settled a fairly large lawsuit with another company in order to continue manufacting the Pentium. Is this rubbish or fact?
It's not a complete history as it didn't mentioned:
/. article about MS employee cracking AltaVista computers.
- How Intel handle the Pentium bug. When the FP bug surfaced, Intel grudgingly agreed to replace Pentium chips if it affected a user significantly. My fellow grad student found out the hard way that his Pentium 90MHz he bragged about yielded wrong results in Matlab for his project. He complained to Intel and Intel wouldn't replace it since it was not important. He was a grad student in an engineering school... how was it NOT important to get accurate results? It took a long time and persistence and a threat to complain to BBB to get it replaced. I never trust Intel since.
- Intel v. DEC. The article made it sound as all the architectural "innovations" in Pentium were the result of Intel's brilliance. What about the 10 patent infringements from Alpha that prompted DEC to sue Intel? There was a thread of this in another
My first PC used to tick while checking ram (First POST - geddit? Oh, never mind.)
I graduated from a ZX81 in 1982, to a Sinclair speccy in 1984, to assorted Atari STs until about 1995 when I finally bought a 90mhz Pentium with a whopping 16 megs of ram.
I pulled that PC out of retirement 5 years ago and set it up as a file/print server running Linux. It was only replaced with a new PC about 18 months ago. I really believe in getting value for money out of old hardware...
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Is it History Day on Slashdot or something?
CowsAnonymous: We're here to help moo.
I work with a lot of old Intel machines and my general rule of thumb is:
You need something running at 75Mhz to play an MP3
You need something running at 100Mhz to encode an MP3 in less time than it takes to play it.
You need something running at 500Mhz to play a DVD
You need something running at 1Ghz to encode video on the fly.
(note: I know I've played a DVD on a 466Mhz machine, but there are some "complicated" DVDs that take just a little bit more horsepower, so that's why I chose 500Mhz as the cutoff point)
My gut feel is that Mac's can probably do these things with a little bit less (10%?) Mhz since their processor arch. seems to be a bit more efficient.
Is there any way of "easily" understanding how a chip handles out of order dependcies? I've done some 6502 programming (Atari 2600) but the idea seems pretty amazing to me...I guess each instruction can only affect a certain # of registers and memory locations, and if another instruction doesn't rely on those, it's ok to run it prematurely, before the the first instruction...
Well, maybe I've answered my own question, but it seems pretty amazing that you can get improved performance with that, and not having to rollback all the time.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Intel brought us ...the deliberately misleading "the P-III makes your Internet faster!!"
God I remember the hype and FUD those B******ds stirred up with that bloddy ad campaign. I can still hear people walking up to me and asking: "Do you have a PC? What's your pentium?". Calm, calm, think happy... "Two OK!! It's two! And tell all your friends you need a pentium or your computer won't work! BEGONE EWES!!" It hurt to hear that again and again. I just gave up correcting people. They looked at me like I was crazy. Geeze listen to this guy, he dosen't know what a pentium is.
If Intel learned anything in those last few years of the P6 core's life, it learned that clock speed sells
It certainly does, and that's still the one thing that keeps me from buying AMD. When I configure a PC I can choose between a Pentium 2.2GHz, or an AMD 2400. Now how fast is the 2400? I don't know, It didn't say, and that's why AMD is No. 2. That and Intels hugely successful campaign of intel inside, making consumers believe that if hasn't got an intel chip, it won't work. They expect it, like they expect a monitor. Let them pay for their ignorence.
May the Maths Be with you!
Found an interesting thing that Intel's been doing with their old Pentium Pro chips...
Making them into keychains for their employees. You can find similar items on Ebay, where someone has just taken an old Pentium and speared a key ring through it, but that's not the same thing...
I have the core and the L2 cache removed from the chip, and embedded into some kinda plated gold mounting.
It's really kinda cool --- if anyone can track down where to get more, I'd love a few other chips...
Wonder how long till my brand new P4 EE (cost almost as much as a used car) shows up on 5 dollar keychains...
[nostalgia]
... when I used to lust, in equal measures, for the hottest girl in my class and the soon-to-be-launched Pentium!!
[/nostalgia]
*sigh*
I've seen only one P1 that was a 300Mhz, and that was a laptop (currently sitting in my backpack). It's the only one I've ever heard of being faster than a 233.
I had only been in the PC-building business for a few months when the Pentiums came out. I was always really nonchalant when it came to building computers and was certainly not gentle. However, everything I had built up to that point either had the CPU soldered onto the motherboard or someone else had done it because I had never seen a separate CPU.
When the first Pentium-based system arrived at my workstation to build I mounted the motherboard to the case and then put the CPU in place, but it didn't go in very well. I pulled it out and bent the pins back into place and put it in again. It felt like it went in okay.
I took the little arm thing and pulled down to secure it in place and heard a sound, but I thought it was okay... I had never done this before.
I put in the cards, drives and memory and fired the system up... blank screen and then... POP!!! and some smoke.
I didn't realize the CPU had a dot that corresponded with a notched corner indicating how to put the thing into place. From then on I started paying attention to things like that.
The Pentium made me mature as a technician... for about a week; then it was a contest to see how far we could launch them in the air. (kidding)
"I'm a karate man. Karate mans bleed on the inside."
Why do people always forget this one???
You need something running at 75Mhz to play an MP3
I've found this highly dependant on the input bit rate. With a 120MHz processor, I used to be able to play up to 160kb/s flawlessly, but anything over that would occasionally stutter, and 256kb/s was unplayable.
You need something running at 100Mhz to encode an MP3 in less time than it takes to play it.
What encoder are you using? I use LAME, and that seems to need ~200MHz to encode in real time.
You need something running at 1Ghz to encode video on the fly.
Again: what encoder are you using? With TMPGEnc Plus encoding mpeg2 with the default setting for the motion search precision, performance on the aforementioned celeron suggests I'd need about 1.6 - 2GHz to get it up to real time (for high quality PAL DVD -- should be about the same for NTSC DVD, which has lower resolution but higher frame rate).
Excel worked fine on a PII (even usuing features most 'business' users don't like regression analysis, formulas, etc)
Yes, but what version of Excel? Excel 97 (or earlier) I'll believe, but I highly doubt Excel 2003 would work fine, by any reasonable definition of fine.
You need all this power because software developers keep adding features...because you have all this power. It's a vicious cycle. I personally don't want a lot of these features, but nobody from Microsoft has called me to ask.
Author also seems to believe that the P1 went up to 300Mhz
It did, just only in its mobile incarnation. But it was the same core (with MMX stuck on).
According to sandpile.org the P1 topped at 300mhz, the last model introduced in 1999.
1978: 8086 processor is released
1979-Present: Regret
I think many of you will know exactly what I mean.
You need something running at 75Mhz to play an MP3
You'll need more than that to actually do something with the computer while the MP3 is playing.
I was forced to upgrade from a Pentium 120MHz because Winamp was sucking 70% of the CPU while playing music. IM and web surfing was slow and the music kept pausing.
Amigap X68000
AtariST
MegaDrive/Genesis
Mac
SUN
Shar
Canon CAT
Alpha Micro 1000 series
Altos ACS-8000 series
Yup more versitile than Arnold Rimmer or a Pentium!
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Someone I know claims to know someone at Intel who had a 486 clocked far above 100Mhz in the early 90s; suppsedly was much faster than equivilent Penitums.
Apparently was an internal-only proof of concept CPU that wasn't ever sold, but got used on some in-house boxes.
I don't need to read it, I've lived it.... :)
-m
http://www.invisik.com
At he didn't scrawl, "I wrote an elegant little essay about this," in the margin.
My firewall/nat/webserver/voice chat server is comprised of an AMD K6 166 running SuSE 7.2, and has been merrily running disklessly since it was installed more than a year ago.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
3015 specs
...yup...
A month ago, I posted a quatrain in which Nostradamus predicted the Pentium scandal. The messages was rather short, and didn't give any details of the interpretation. During the last month, I discussed about this prediction with other readers, and we found out plenty of stuff.
...
:-)
For those who missed the original post, here is the relevant quatrain:
C 2,VI:
Aupres des portes & dedans deux citez
Seront deux fleaux, & onc n'apperceut VN TEL,
Faim, dedans peste, de fer hors gens boutez,
Crier secours au grand Dieu immortel.
and its translation to English:
Near the gates and inside two cities
Will be TWO FLAWS, and nobody noticed it [from] INTEL
Hunger, pest inside, by steel people thrown out
Cry for help to the great immortal God.
INTEL's name:
The spelling is not quite correct: a V instead of an I, and an extra space between N and T. The word resembles more the french expression 'un tel' (meaning 'such', 'what-s-his-name', 'same' or 'some person') especially since u's and v's are often substituted. Critics could say that 'un tel' would be a common French expression, and dismiss the prediction as pure chance. However, the words 'vn tel' occur only once in all the quatrains, and that's here!
The space in VN TEL is maybe a hint at a pun. In could be a prefix meaning 'not', and in-tel[l] = those who do not tell (Like in in-correct = not correct, in-divisble = not divisible, im-precise = not precise). If we consider the v as an u, we keep this meaning: un-professional = not professional, un-tested = not tested.
V is also the roman numeral 5, as in 586,PENTium, or 5 missing lookup fnord table entries (which caused the bug).
The repetition of INSIDE:
In this quatrain, the word 'inside' (dedans) occurs twice, which is remarkable, considering that it only occurs 24 times in total in all
the quatrains. This must have a meaning. You guessed it: The 'In-tell Inside' advertisement campaign.
The number 24 itself also has a meaning: It's the mean time between division errors (in days) for normal spreadsheet usage according to IBM's analysis. Nostradamus himself believed IBM (24 days) more than In-tell (27000 years)!
The Gates
There are some doubts whether these refer to Bill Gate$, or rather to the logical gates on the microprocessor.
The Cities
Here we have two interpretations too:
1. The cities mean corporations, as in Micro$oft and In-tell. In-tell had the pentium bug, and Micro$oft the Windows calculator bug (2.01 - 2.00 = 0!)
2. The city is the aspect of the microprocessor when looked at under a microscope. (Remember that In-tell commercial where the 'camera' flies into the PC and discovers the Pentium?) The different parts of the processors can be viewed as distinct neighbouring cities: the floating point unit, the integer unit, the cache memory,
According to this interpretation, another Pentium bug will be found in one of the other units. It's severity will be comparable to the FDIV bug.
Two flaws
Obvious. The FDIV flaw, and the yet-to-be discovered integer flaw.
Hunger
In-tell's _greed_, which made them hide the flaw and minimize it later. The hunger may also hint at In-tell's bankruptcy after the second flaw will be discovered by the public. In-tell will lose almost all its market share, and many employees will lose their jobs.
Pest inside
Nostradamus' version of 'In-tell Inside'
By steel
Steel = hardware. This is not a SOFTware bug (as most bugs), but a HARDware bug. (And in the traditional sense, hardware means 'steel tools')
People thrown out
Initially In-tell 'threw out' (turned down) people asking for a replacement chip, because they were not deemed worthy.
Another interpretation would be that people threw out their chips. (Re-arrange the words: 'By people steel th
This is the part of hell where one has to use Java products....
I have a 800MHz Pentium based T20 running Websphere Studio Application Developer. 512 MB of RAM. I'm using 1GB of virtual memory when I run my programs. My CPU regularly spikes through to 100%. Its hell on earth. Wait a minute. Maybe I'm dead and in hell, since this misery seems to be constant....
So the answer to your question about why we need all this power is ...Java.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
And to think... my uncle is still using his 75MHz Pentium every day. The funny thing is it still fits his needs and sees no reason to upgrade. It takes forever to boot up and get into his AOL account, but he just leaves the room for a while... watches tv... grabs a snac... and by then it should be there for him. I have been trying to convince him to upgrade for years, but I guess you could say he is getting his moneys worth.
I was forced to upgrade from a Pentium 120MHz because Winamp was sucking 70% of the CPU while playing music. IM and web surfing was slow and the music kept pausing.
I assume you weren't running NT4 on that machine?
Probably more to do with Windows 9x's poor multitasking ability - this might happen with a P4 too, it if runs Windows 98. I'm pretty sure I didn't have any problems playing mp3's on a Pentium 100 while browsing the web or doing other such light tasks under Red Hat 5.2 - and I assume you wouldn't have had such a problem with NT4 either.
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
What y'all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?
Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills
Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don't read spam
Installed a T1 line in my house
Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse
Upgrade my system at least twice a day
I'm strictly plug-and-play, I ain't afraid of Y2K
I'm down with Bill Gates, I call him "Money" for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support
It's all about the Pentiums, what?
You've gotta be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen
You've got white-out all over your screen
You think your Commodore 64 is really neato
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet
Your database is a disaster
You're waxin' your modem, tryin' to make it go faster
Hey fella, I bet you're still livin' in your parents' cellar
Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
And postin' "Me too!" like some brain-dead AOL-er
I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller
You're just about as useless as jpegs to Hellen Keller
Uh, uh, loggin' in now
Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
Got 'em printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
My digital media is write-protected
Every file inspected, no viruses detected
I beta tested every operating system
Gave props to some, and others? I dissed 'em
While your computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin'
It does all my work without me even askin'
Got a flat-screen monitor forty inches wide wide
I believe that your says "Etch-A-Sketch" on the side
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user
You've got your own newsgroup, "alt.total-loser"
Your motherboard melts when you try to send a fax
Where'd you get your CPU, in a box of Cracker Jacks?
Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you
If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you
What? What? What? What? What?
The Socket 7 AMD chips went to 550MHz. I recall it being an extra 50 bucks or so when picking out a cpu back then (went with 500MHz)
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
if you truly wrote that yourself, you are a god.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
The P1 did go up to 300MHz, but it was only sold in mobile forms, for laptops and what-not.
Wow,
;) .. and we had to ride to work '95 Ford Taurass's using EPA unfriendly AC coolant and had to put up with Mcdonald ads that didn't have "I'm lovin it!" in the tagline and didn't worry about none of 'dem carbs.
;)
I remember running one of the first nvidia graphics card demos on my dell pentium 90 box..
Whew..
back when Eniac was going strong, at least!
Whew.. back when Eniac was going strong, at least
*I apologize for the pointlessness of this post*
-------
But, back on topic.. does anyone remember when Intel messed up with their floating point calculations and a ton of Pentium chips had to be returned in order to work correctly? Heh.
Just how lazy do you have to be to write:
"To this day, I still have no idea "who or what was responsible for the name "Pentium,"
when all he had to do was ask someone. The simple and correct answer given by "parent post" is known by ALL geeks above a certain age.
"(note: I know I've played a DVD on a 466Mhz machine, but there are some "complicated" DVDs that take just a little bit more horsepower, so that's why I chose 500Mhz as the cutoff point)"
My PentiumII/266 played DVDs fine. Then again, I was using a hardware DVD decoder.
Sigs are for losers
I grew up on an Atari ST520, later upgraded to a 1040 (eleet)
;)
Funny, My first PC was the Atari 1040ST with the PC-Ditto hardware mod. Yup, I soldered that NEC V20 daughter board right on top of the 68000 CPU. Funny thing, since the ST didn't have the same hardware limitation the PC had, My Atari turned PC had 704K base memory free... (704K should be enough for anybody, right?
Not quite...
In the 486 days, FPUs were notorious for die failures. Intel couldn't justify tossing out chips when the rest of core was perfectly usable, hence the SX and DX suffixes.
DX meant the FPU miraculously passed.
Let's not even get started on yields of the cache-on-die for Pentium Pro *shudder*.
The last desktop CPU was a 266 MHz CPU with MMX.
The last non-MMX CPU topped out around 200 MHz, but was very hard to find.
Don't know about the server or mobile CPUs.
I hate to ask, but this wasn't covered in the article...
Disclaimer: I am NOT a CPU geek...
So, what's the difference between today's "Celeron" chips, a "P4", and what are AMD's comparable chips?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
I know it's not nice to want people to die... but I want those people to die.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
The article lacks a lot of detail, especially about the Pentium I. It makes it look like the "addition of MMX" was to only enhancement of the Pentium I. Instead it went through at least two redesigns and shrinks. First from a BiCMOS based P60 and P66 to the later P75-P200 design. The "addition" of MMX brought many additional tweaks as a far improved branch prediction.
The article does also claim that the Pentium I FPU was sub par. This is not true, in fact the design gets the most out of a stack-based FPU without resorting to out-of-order exucution. The FPU of the much praised contender at that time, the 68060 was as much as three times slower due to lack of pipelining.
Some flaws in the Pentium I designs: Waste of resources for a dual read data cache, which is rarely utilized. Dog slow shift and integer multiplication as compared to motorolas offerings, but intel kept the strategy also in later CPUs.
Click here for a list of information, screen captures, video clips, etc. It also includes commercials with the Blue Man Group (P3 to P4)!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
With TMPGEnc Plus encoding mpeg2 with the default setting for the motion search precision, performance on the aforementioned celeron suggests I'd need about 1.6 - 2GHz to get it up to real time (for high quality PAL DVD -- should be about the same for NTSC DVD, which has lower resolution but higher frame rate).
Maybe, but the default motion search precision is pretty poor quality in TMPGEnc Plus v3. My AthlonXP 1800+ with PC2100 RAM takes about 7x realtime to encode a full-frame 720x480 30fps NTSC stream. And since that's VBR, it's not really on-the-fly anyways.
The original poster is probably talking about capturing straight to DivX / XVid / MPEG4. Which might be doable for half-D1 or quarter-D1 resolutions.
But the DVDs are actually in the DVD player sitting next to the computer...
Am I having a CRC error here or didn't the original Pentium indeed do register renaming with FXCH?
I have a faint recollection about building complex graphs about dependencies which would have been pretty damn useless if it didn't work out that way..
You had me at "the decoupling of the front-end's fetching and decoding functions from the back-end's execution function, by means of an instruction window."
The author begins by noting that he has no idea where the name Pentium came from, but that it wasn't sufficiently geeky. The company that did come up with the name Lexicon is certainly very geeky (IMO I've never met anyone who works there), composed primarily of linguists who break speech into it's smallest parts and recombine to come up with some of the most famous geek names ever:
Apple's Powerbook, Intel's Centrino, GE's OnStar, Blackberry, Adobe's InDesign, HP's Pavillion, etc.
cogito ergo oro
But how does this bash microsloth or worship apple?
Sincerely,
A confused slashbot.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
1. P-Pro wasn't just 256/512 there were 1mb and 2mb versions.
2. P-3 was initially off-chip L2 but later went to on-chip L2.
3. P-2 was available up to 333MHz on the desktop end and 400MHz on the laptop end.
4. It was implied that the SECC cartridge was just on the P-2, the P-3 also used a SECC cartridge and continued even after Socket 370 was standardized.
5. The author said that the P-3 brought the Bunny Suits, no that was the P-2. The P-3 brought us the sock monkey, robot, and even the blue man group.
And by fine, I mean there was a few seconds of stutter about once every 90 minutes of play time--depending on the disc, the CPU was railed to 100%, and once it was playing, yopu had to leave it alone, or the system would start to thrash.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
While Windows 3.1 ran like a (misshappen) dream on the 486, when people switched to '95 they soon found incentive to upgrade their hardware within a matter of days too.
The good ole days of PCI, Pentium, Plug and Pray.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
Well, my colleague's 486 was running at 120 MHz and was very stable, he could also run it on 133 MHz but then it was behaving bad. He overclocked it to play Quake on it :) Actually it ran quite OK.
There was a DX-2 100, but it wasn't on the market long. It had stablity problems (I believe RAM related), so the RAM had to introduce wait states, which reduced the speed advantages over the DX-4 100. The part was more expensive because fewer of them succeeded, and it confused the market which was all 25/33 MHz buses, trying to create a 50 MHz bus that was only used for that chip (the 25 was used for the SX25, DX25, DX-2 50; the 33 for the SX33, DX33, DX-2 66, and DX-4 100, but most importantly the motherboards/chipsets, all third party at the time, were mature at 25/33, and 50 was touch) was a marketing mess so it rather died.
I remember having a DX-33, and the upgrade chips DX-2 66, etc., were REALLY expensive and not great. I looked at upgrading, but at the time, the press ragged on Intel because doubling the clock speed only increased performance a "bit" 25% or so IIRC, and clock doubling was seen as a cheap hack.
However, beginning with the P133, it began to shine.
Alex
Actually no. You are the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Take a look at Toshiba 3020CT
UNDER PROCESSOR section.
Yes I did have this laptop, and yes it does run at 300 mhz.
~omi
Also windows 95. In windows 3.1, the 486DX100 outperformed the pentium 60. But in windows 95, with multi-taskings, the pentium absolutely shat all over the 486.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
generation -1: 6800
generation 0: 68000, 68005
generation 1: 68010
gen2: 68020
gen3: 68030
gen4: 68040
gen5: cancelled
gen6: 68060
gen7: discontinued