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Comparative CPU Benchmarks From 1995 to 2004
Lux writes "The guys over at Tom's Hardware Guide have been busy recently! They've compared over a hundred different architectures dating all the way back to the Pentium 1 in one huge benchmarking effort. Looking to upgrade an older system? Unlike most benchmarks, which compare modern systems to other modern systems, these charts can help you figure out if the cost of upgrading is worth the speedup or if you should hold off for a bit longer."
Back when I upgraded my 386 16 Mhz, I told myself that I'd upgrade every 10x in performance gain. I upgraded to a Pentium 90 Mhz, then to an Athlon 900 Mhz. It seems that with the recent troubles of AMD/Intel at breaking the 4 Ghz barrier that I won't keep my 'promise' anytime soon, sadly.
How will they keep their market alive if they can't upgrade the performance? Its not like CPU chips are burning easily anyhow... so why get a replacement if the performance gain is not worth it? (Especially for web browsing / text editing only folks who upgrade based on marketing ONLY... yes! 3 Ghz more will make your internet go faster! Heh)
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Actually, they only benchmark one architecture, x86. A real shame, I would love to see a thorough comparison of *multiple* processor architectures over a long period of time.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Put Linux on it, it'll make a perfectly decent home firewall, dns server, web server and mail server. It'll still have plenty of horsepower left over as well.
"Comparative CPU Benchmarks From 1995 to 2004"
I only see x86 CPUs. What about the PowerPCs, SPARCs, MIPS, Alphas, ARMs, and so on?
For instance, the m68060 was the first consumer level processor with branch prediction and branch folding, superscalar dispatch, and real-world throughput of more than one instruction per clock cycle. Except for floating point where it performed only modestly, the m68060 seriously outperformed the Pentium in spite of only having a 32 bit data bus as compared with the Pentium's 64 bit bus. Isn't this significant in illustrating the influences in processor architecture?
http://www.sixgirls.org/ is an m68060 Amiga running NetBSD 2.0. Still very useful after all this time. Where are all those Pentium 60 machines?
Would be nice if they included what software was available at each level. For example, I had XENIX (from Microsoft and SCO) on an early 386 and it rocked (full 32-bits), but Microsoft didn't do 32-bits on the desktop until Win95 (10 years later), and didn't migrate to a full 32-bit O/S until Win2K and XP (nearly 15 years after the 386 came out).
This site says different, it lists:
80487 Intel 487 SX CPGA SZ494, USA
Another forum I found has this to say, which is interesting (take it with a grain of salt, I don't vouch for what "RatBoy" says)
Intel created an inferior version of the CPU in the SX, but remember they did the same thing with the 386 SX and DX. There was a nasty rumour that the 486 SX was created only because a batch of 486 chips had faulty FPUs and this was a way for Intel to sell damaged goods and still make some money on them. This rumour was helped out when Intel introduced the 487 math co-processor for the 486 SX. It turned out the 487 was really a 486 DX with one extra pin whose job it was to completely shutdown the 486 SX when you plugged the 487 into your motherboard next to the 486 SX!
Either way, there was (is) a 487.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Though that was before my time, I do know for sure that AMD made processors way before they got the clock speed to 600MHz, so you're right about that.
The primary end-result of the evolution of this commodity hardware is the fact that expensive software is now just obsolete - plain and simple. Ten years ago, there was a justified price premium associated with state of the art software algorithms. I still see these zealots for the DB companies raising these red-herring issues as to why every organization should still spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive DB software. With the evolution of hardware the way it is, any credible SQL DB Engine could run almost any company. Same thing for web and application servers. How can anyone justify paying for these things when the hosting companies prove everyday for thousands of tech-savvy companies that the free solution is just as scalable and more secure. I used to maintain several Windwos servers and finally ported them to a hosted Apache solution - for about 5% of the cost. The sites are always available and the admin tools are web-based and better. And I don't have to hire these guys that want to go to the MS Marketing summit for a week every year so they can continue to administer the "low-cost MS solution approach". If you have any hesitation, make the switch. This stuff is now public domain, don't pay for this stuff. Those days are long gone. In the new model, it only makes sense to pay for software that solves industry-specific problems - not for tools that cost a fortune to maintain and invite tech companies into your business to meddle and start religous wars among the employees. www.SoftwareObjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
So, in order to combat a cyclical chip/semiconductor market, I propose that chip and PC companies artificially prop up the demand for their products - by riddling the world with slow-you-down spyware/adware/etc programs!
Joe Sixpack doesn't know it's his software. He just knows that his 2 year old computer is slow as hell right now and that he needs a new one! It doesn't matter that all he does is e-mail and web browsing...
User unawareness keeps the PC market chugging, and I see no reason to believe why some PC and chip manufacturers don't absolutely love all the crap that clogs Joe's system.
Berto
Are games currently multi-threaded enough for multi-core to have any effect? Do games developers even want that debugging headache?
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
However, beware of the 486DX50 vs the 486DX250. The 486DX 50 was a true 50Mhz part whereas the DX2 were only 50Mhz internal to the chip with the bus running at 25Mhz.
Of course, then there's the other side of this issue, which was VLB: Vesa Local Bus (which is what we used for fast access to graphics cards [and sometimes IDE disk] before PCI/AGP) was only spec'd to run at 33MHz tops, and many VLB cards wouldn't run at 50 MHz. So you often had a choice: buy the 50 MHZ 486 DX to get the full 50MHz bus speed, but use an ISA graphics card, or buy the DX2/50 and use a VLB graphics card a 25MHz. The usual answer (once it came out) was the 486 DX2/66, which was a 66 MHz processor on a 33 MHz bus, topping out the local bus clock. Some things still ran faster on the 486DX/50, but games usually ran better on the DX2/66 due to the higher graphics card throughput.
Of course, the highest end graphics cards (Diamond's Viper, ferinstance) could generally handle a 50MHz clock. But most of us didn't have that kind of scratch lying around at the time.
-JDF
which are fundamentally flawed for real user needs. They compare different systems running the same software (can you believe?) That might be relevant in academia, but in the real world, it's much more useful to compare complete systems: processor, disk, OS and applications. When you do that, you'll find that for the bulk of common user applications (web browsing being a notable exception), today's systems simply aren't much faster than older ones. Compare a system running Windoze XP / Office XP running on a 3 GHz machine today with a Windoze 98 / Office 98 machine running on a Pentium II. Not much difference in usable speed (which I define as time to boot, time to launch an application, time to do a common task like write a letter or create a spreadsheet, etc.) Sure, recalc on a zillion cell spreadsheet will be faster, but two things work against improvement: 1) both machines spend most of their time waiting for the user to do something, and 2) bloatware.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I must disagree with you on the "most human eyes can't distinguish the difference between 40 and 80fps." This may be somewhat more true of movies which are made with motion blur that blends the frames together. But you can certainly still tell the difference for the better when a movie is captured at 60fps rather than 30. Its not as big a difference as changing the framerate in a game is due to the motion blur but its certainly more visually pleasing when a video is captured and played at a higher framerate.
Back on track though, games have no motion blur... each frame is sharp and leads into the next with no blur. So in order to get a smooth look to it the framerate must be much higher in order to trick the brain into seeing a smoothly transitioning scene. I can easily tell the difference between framerates up to about 120fps, after which it becomes very difficult to discerne the changes.
Of course if you are playing a game and bump up your framerate without increasing your refresh rate as well, you are basically wasting rendering power as the monitor is only drawing the same number of frames as the current refresh rate. Keeping your refresh at or higher than your average framerate will make for a much more pleasant gaming experience.
Here is an ancient but still very much valid write-up on Framerate and Refresh Rate in regards to gaming:
Framerate and refresh rate write up
well, i'm still using a 486 as my main computer...
not joking, its a pet computer, with more than 10 years:
amd 486dx5 (aka 5x86) @133, overclocked to 160Mhz, bus 40Mhz
64Mb EDO ram (max for the motherboard and chipset)
1 80G IDE HD, 2 SCSI HD (20Gb and 4Gb)
1 SCSI CDRW
matrox millenium PCI graphic card
3Com PCI network card
it is running a slackware 10.0, kernel 2.6.9, X11 with fluxbox, dillo, sylpheed, xfe, alot rxvt
running in background samba, cups, apache, ssh, mysql, privoxy, spambayes,nfs and postfix
it have some users and its also my main server
it have many tuneup so its dont waste cpu cycles
for normal using (web, mail, system manager, etc) is still very good, not that diferent than a moderm machine
now if i try to compile anything, well... i have to wait, so i only compile things during when i'm sleeping or before leaving for work
some times i turn on distcc and my duron 700 and laptop at 700Mhz give a help
algo, gpg trustdb checks also take long time, and anything that last more than 10 seconds in a moderm machine
by the way, the 2.6.9 kernel took about 8 hours (or more, can tell for sure) to compile
i'm using about 400Mb of swap, in the scsi drive, so the low memory is not that much a problem unless if i try to use too much things at same time
also, i search and test alot of apps to see the lighters and fasters, check all options in programs and servers to see the effect (i found that some little options eat ALOT of CPU, while others make almost no diference)
its great to test server daemons in higher load, i can see that some daemons are junk, but with moderm machines people cant see that, while others are still very complete and alot faster
it still very stable, very usable and its my favorite computer... that is why i still use it as may main machine, and not the others near it that are fasters with more memory
i also like to recover old computers to use for what ever people around me need
Higuita