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What came after the 486?

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Re: What came after the 486?

#121

Post by tracker1 »

rasz wrote: post #14
Anonasty wrote: post #9

The years when Pentium came was a bit of an shitshow. As the article said, there were 7 companies producing 486 processors but after that the market was mostly Intel, AMD and little Cyrix. Then came socket-A vs. slot-A etc. Now looking back it seems like there was lot of changes in short period of time.

Things started progressing so fast in mid nineties that brand new top of the line computer was being matched in performance by low end offerings 2 years later. Lasted up to late 2000. December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s. January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133…

Better, throwing in two of those Celeron 300As into a modded dual socket MB... I remember running one of those OC'd Duron's at 1.1ghz... had a custom shim to better support the cpu cooler with it. IIRC, I ran it with a Voodoo 3 card and maxed out ram. Had 2x IBM Deathstar drives in Raid-0... that was the big mistake, crazy fast, but first drive died, and then the second before I could get an RMA on the first. Only the 3tb Seagate line was worse.

Re: What came after the 486?

#122

Post by accrual »

tirant wrote: post #97
sombragris wrote: post #50

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 purch…

I indeed remember too the family of K6 chips and their Super Socket 7 motherboards. They were cheap and affordable, and allowed cpu upgrades to classical Socket 7 motherboards. The peak of the Super Socket 7 performance CPUs was reached when AMD released the + versions of those chips, the K6-2+ and K6-3+. Those were initially designed for laptops with lower powerconsumption and some enhanced instruction set. But they…

I happen to have one of those 600MHz chips on my bench currently! It's a K6-2+ that has had the remaining 128KB cache unlocked, making it a K6-3+. It is indeed a speedy chip, performing somewhere above a Pentium II-450 according to Speedsys.

Do you recall how long you used the platform or your next upgrade choice? :)

Re: What came after the 486?

#124

Post by antod »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #83
chasil wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That reminds of using the pencil method on an Athlon to overclock.

Didn't the Celeron 333 (easily overclockable to 450) also have a similar pencil short hack to enable SMP in a dual slot mb?

Re: What came after the 486?

#125

Post by Delk »

electrosphere wrote: post #100
pavlov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I remember 1999/2000-ish I had both a Pentium III/Intel motherboard and Athlon PC. The Pentium III system was rock solid, and performed fantasic. Even the CPU and motherboard looked amazing. The Athlon was solid but less reliable, various reboots and glitches. I kind have always had a preference for Intel since then.

A lot of that probably came down to the motherboard chipset. IIRC Intel made their own chipsets for the Pentium III and they were good and reliable. Athlons were coupled with chipsets from VIA and whatnot.

Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.

Re: What came after the 486?

#126

Post by oleggromov »

I remember I had a Cyrix 6x86 in one of my first computers that ran windows 95. It was terrible. When I tried to play games or run some apps with non-trivial performance requirements and, I suppose, that used floating point operations extensively, perhaps MMX or some other proprietary extensions, apps would just die. Often with the entire operating system.

Re: What came after the 486?

#127

Post by oleggromov »

MattGrommes wrote: post #118

I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for my cheap Cyrix CPU. Once I was near finishing an important project in the middle of the night and my CPU fan died. The cyrix chip would overheat in no time and shut down so I ended up filling a coffee mug with ice and jamming it up against the chip, giving me more precious minutes before it got hot enough to shut down again. I would swap out the ice in the mug and give it…

You got the water cooling before it was cool, minus the thermal paste.

Re: What came after the 486?

#128

Post by oleggromov »

dspillett wrote: post #58
nobleach wrote: post #55

I was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was m…

> I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. Those chips were excellent value for mostly integer work, but had incredibly poor floating-point performance which was a problem for gamers as the 3D era was really getting going around that time. I had one, it did me good service for a few years.

Not only performance, I strongly suspect there were issues with implementation too as the apps would just freeze/die frequently.

Re: What came after the 486?

#129

Post by Tuna-Fish »

sombragris wrote: post #50

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 purch…

K6 was great at everything other than FP. Unfortunately for AMD, a year before its launch ID released Quake, for which the primary metric of performance was basically "how fast are you at FP". And Quake very rapidly became the common benchmark against which CPU performance was measured.

Re: What came after the 486?

#130

Post by Tuna-Fish »

dspillett wrote: post #47
chasil wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ord…

The Pentium was not just pipelined but also superscalar; it had two pipelines (U and V). U implemented all instructions, V only implemented a subset of simpler ones, and only when using simple (prefix-less) encodings.

As the CPU was not out of order, to execute two instructions per clock you had to pair them so that the second one was simple, and did not use the output of the first one. Existing code and most compilers around at the time were generally bad at this, but things like inner render loops in games could make a lot of use if you wrote them in assembly.

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