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What came after the 486?

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Re: What came after the 486?

#41

Post by rob74 »

twoodfin wrote: post #33
p_l wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around the time of K8 being released, I remember reading official intel roadmaps announced to normal people, and they essentially planned that for at least few more years if not more they will segment into increasingly consumer-only 32bit and IA-64 on the higher end

Itanium was bonkers in lots of ways—very cool in others. But this market segmentation idea just seems absolutely insane to me in a way I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain. It requires Intel to voluntarily destroy the commodity economics that put their CPUs on a rocket ship to domination. It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its…

Well, TBH it wasn't all FUD - hanging on to x86 eventually (much later) came back to bite them when x86 CPUs weren't competitive for tablets and smartphones, leading to Apple developing their own ARM-based RISC CPUs (which run circles around the previous x86 CPUs) and dumping Intel altogether.

Re: What came after the 486?

#42

Post by dspillett »

gabrielsroka wrote: post #3
stevefan1999 wrote: post #2

Ah the pentium, aka 5-ium due to the penta- prefix. It is actually a nod from 4 to 5, but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium. But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.

Trademarks > The name invoked the number five, but was completely trademarkable, unlike the number 586.

Yes, and Intel had actually lost a legal attempt to stop people using the numbers (I can't remember if this was earlier in the 486 era or if it was something they tried first with 586).

But marketing was a large part of the reason that they started caring so much at that particular time. The Pentium line was the first time Intel had marketed directly to the end users¹² in part as a response to alt-486 manufacturers (AMD, Cyryx) doing the same with their products⁴ like clock-doubled units compatible with standard 486/487 targetted sockets (which were cheaper and, depending on workload, faster than the Intel upgrade options).

--------

[1] this was the era that “Intel Inside (di dum di dum)” initially came from

[2] that was also why the FDIV bug was such a big thing despite processor bugs³ being, within the industry, an accepted part of the complex design and manufacturing process

[3] for a few earlier examples: a 486 FPU bug that resulted in what should have been errors (such as overflow) being silently ignored, another (more serious) one in trig functions that resulted in a partial recall and the rest of that line being marked down as 486SX units (with a pin removed to effectively disable the FPU), similarly an entire stepping of 386 chips ended up sold as “for 16 bit code only”, going further back into the 8-bit days some versions of the 6502 had a bug or two in handling things (jump instructions, loading via relative references) that straddled page boundaries (which were mitigated in code by being careful with code/data alignment, no recalls, just errata published)

Re: What came after the 486?

#43

Post by AdamN »

twoodfin wrote: post #33
p_l wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around the time of K8 being released, I remember reading official intel roadmaps announced to normal people, and they essentially planned that for at least few more years if not more they will segment into increasingly consumer-only 32bit and IA-64 on the higher end

Itanium was bonkers in lots of ways—very cool in others. But this market segmentation idea just seems absolutely insane to me in a way I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain. It requires Intel to voluntarily destroy the commodity economics that put their CPUs on a rocket ship to domination. It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its…

They were trying to compete with Sun and IBM in the server space (SPARC and Power) and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was). The baggage of 32-bit x86 would have just slowed it all down. However having an x86-64 would have confused customers in the middle.

Think back then it was all about massive databases - that was where the big money was and x86 wasn't really setup for the top end load patterns of databases (or OLAP data lakes).

Re: What came after the 486?

#44

Post by montroser »

I remember those Cyrix chips well. We had a little shop where we would assemble boxes to spec. And hey, a 486 is a 486, we reasoned. They were cheap, ran cool, and just about as fast as the others.

Re: What came after the 486?

#45

Post by pavlov »

specproc wrote: post #8

I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.

The Pentium III does sound like a good chip choice for a retro cyberpunk story. Like they said in “The Matrix”, 1999 was the peak of human civilization.

(586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)

Re: What came after the 486?

#46

Post by sgerenser »

mememememememo wrote: post #34
ricardo81 wrote: post #24

Ah. There's a whole generation of people who never enjoyed the Intel inside / Pentium jingle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU

"enjoyed" It was annoying as it seemed every computer ad needed to play it, not just intel ads.

They didn’t need to, it by playing it and slapping Intel Insude stickers on the computer, they got a substantial marketing fee/kickback per unit sold.

Re: What came after the 486?

#47

Post by dspillett »

chasil wrote: post #16
laurencerowe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i686 was the microarchitecture introduced with the Pentium Pro and then Pentium II.

If I am correct, the Pentium Pro was the first "out of order" design. It specialized in 32-bit code, and did not handle 16-bit code very well. The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance. AMD actually made successful CPUs based on Berkeley RISC, similar to SPARC (they used register windows). The AMD K5 had this RISC CPU at its…

> The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance.

It wasn't a full pipeline, but large parts of the integer ALU and related circuitry were duplicated so that complex (time-consuming) instructions like multiply could directly follow each other without causing a pipeline bubble. Things were still essentially executed entirely in-order but the second MUL (or similar) could start before the first was complete, if it didn't depend upon the result of the first, and the Pentium line had a deeper pipeline than previous Intel chips to take most advantage of this.

The compiler optimisations, and similar manual code changes with the compiler wasn't bright enough, were to reduce the occurrence of instructions depending on the results of the instructions before, which would make the pipeline bubble come back as the subsequent instructions couldn't be started until the current one was complete. This was also a time when branch prediction became a major concern, and further compiler optimisations (and manual coding tricks) were used to help here too, because aborting a deep pipeline because of a branch (or just stalling the pipeline at the conditional branch point until the decision is made) causes quite a performance cost.

Re: What came after the 486?

#48

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

pavlov wrote: post #45
specproc wrote: post #8

I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.

The Pentium III does sound like a good chip choice for a retro cyberpunk story. Like they said in “The Matrix”, 1999 was the peak of human civilization. (586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)

IIRC III was also 6th gen microarchitecture. Pentium IV was the 7th.

Re: What came after the 486?

#49

Post by daniel_iversen »

montroser wrote: post #44

I remember those Cyrix chips well. We had a little shop where we would assemble boxes to spec. And hey, a 486 is a 486, we reasoned. They were cheap, ran cool, and just about as fast as the others.

Me too, and I recall the Cyrix "Pentium-like" chips were cheaper and faster than Intel's actual Pentium chips! [1]

[1] https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html

Re: What came after the 486?

#50

Post by sombragris »

I remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day.

Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.

Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.

This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.

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