486 SX 33Mhz, could not afford the DX
The 486 SX was a fine chip, just no math copro.
The 386 SX was a crap, 16 bit wide bus IIRC.
Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
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Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#32The 486 killer app was DOOM. It was butter-smooth at 20 fps if you also had a VLB graphic card. The 486 DX2 66MHz was the target platform for gaming during almost two years (1992-1994). That was an huge achievement back in the days to be at the top that long.
The DX/2 66 is a true legend of a chip. It was so good. The final nail in the coffin for the Amiga and for 68k. I love the Amiga, but it just didn’t Doom. Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the wo…
I remember arguments (and benchmarks) around all the variations of the 486 since the bus speed/clock speed was uncoupled (the /2 is clock doubling). For some applications, a 50Mhz 486 with a 50Mhz bus would beat a DX/2 66Mhz with a 33Mhz bus.
And sometimes the DX/4 100Mhz would be slowest of all those at 25Mhz bus.
Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DX/2 66 is a true legend of a chip. It was so good. The final nail in the coffin for the Amiga and for 68k. I love the Amiga, but it just didn’t Doom. Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the wo…
As I noted in my other comment (1), in 1985 Amiga OCS bitplane graphics (separate each bits of a pixel index into separate areas) was a huge boon in 2d capability since it lowered bandwidth to 6/8ths but made 3d rendering a major pain in the ass. The Aga chipset of the 1200/4000 stupidly only added 2 more bitplanes. The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was f…
Commodore so slowly and ineffectually improving on the OCS didn't help, but the original sin of the Amiga was committed in the beginning, with planar graphics (i.e., slow and hard to work with, even setting aside HAM) and TV-oriented resolutions/refresh rates (i.e., users needing to buy a "flicker fixer"). It's like they looked at one of the most important reasons for the PC and Mac's success—a gorgeous, rock-solid monochrome display—and said "Let's do exactly the opposite!"
Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#34I've got one sitting on the shelf above my desk, a 33 Mhz dx, I don't even remember what machine it came out of.
Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#35How was the person incorrect that speed increases won't continue forever? Pentium 4 was 3.8GHz and Ryzen 7 has 4.7Ghz some 20 odd years later?
Clock speeds used to be going up in a straight line (the normal "interpretation" of Moore's law) - but once the P4 hit a (kind of useless 3.8GHz) we leveled off for decades.
More specifically, it was the end of Dennard scaling [0] that killed off the growth in clock speeds in the mid-2000s.
Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#36How was the person incorrect that speed increases won't continue forever? Pentium 4 was 3.8GHz and Ryzen 7 has 4.7Ghz some 20 odd years later?
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Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#37486 SX 33Mhz, could not afford the DX
The 486 SX was a fine chip, just no math copro. The 386 SX was a crap, 16 bit wide bus IIRC.
Ahhh but it gave me the opportunity to ran real programs, coming from an XT!
*Edited to add an example: I could for the first time use AutoCAD.
The price difference between a 286 and a 386SX was negligible, but the software I could use, was other league.
Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
My classmate kept his Amiga 1200 a bit longer! ...eventually he got a PC with Pentium 60 MHz.
Yeah, there were holdouts of course but the DX/2 really seems like the breaking point. (Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)
Pentium is a bad processor? It's way faster than 486, especially on FP it's not even close.
Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DX/2 66 is a true legend of a chip. It was so good. The final nail in the coffin for the Amiga and for 68k. I love the Amiga, but it just didn’t Doom. Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the wo…
I remember arguments (and benchmarks) around all the variations of the 486 since the bus speed/clock speed was uncoupled (the /2 is clock doubling). For some applications, a 50Mhz 486 with a 50Mhz bus would beat a DX/2 66Mhz with a 33Mhz bus. And sometimes the DX/4 100Mhz would be slowest of all those at 25Mhz bus.
Nearly correct. The DX/4 100MHz had a 33MHz bus. The DX/4 75MHz had the 25MHz bus. I remember well because I had both.
Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, there were holdouts of course but the DX/2 really seems like the breaking point. (Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)
Pentium is a bad processor? It's way faster than 486, especially on FP it's not even close.
The Pentium was great, but the 60 and 66MHz versions were not liked, they ran way too hot.