Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, even in like 1996/1997 for certain industries there were hints as to the way things were going, even if it took 4/5 years for the transition to fully take place. For example, in 1996/1997, Digital Domain (VFX industry) used a 'render farm' cluster of Carrera Alpha workstations running NT to render the Titanic film, instead of SGIs running IRIX. (SGIs were still often used on the artists workstations though, but…
In 1999, AMD Athlon became the first x86 CPU that was able to do both an addition and a multiplication during one clock cycle, for the 80-bit x87 floating-point numbers. The previous Intel CPUs of the P6 family, from Pentium Pro to Pentium III, required 2 clock cycles for that, i.e. they reached at most half the throughput of Athlon at the same clock frequency. And Athlon had an even higher clock frequency. So the la…
Hell, if you -could- keep the pipeline from mispredicting and fed with data, one or two of it's internal ALUs actually ran at 2x the main CPU clock. Alas, that's an even bigger ask than adding SSE2 branching, and they decided to do RDRAM (Which, AFAIR was worse for overall latency than SDR or DDR)