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Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

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Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#101

Post by perching_aix »

welfare wrote: post #17

How 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?

> How was the person incorrect that speed increases won't continue forever?

Through the magic of saying something different in actuality, which really ended up being proven incorrect. From the blogpost above, verbatim, italicizing the relevant bits:

> Writing in the May 8, 1989 issue of Infoworld, Michael Slater warned that the sixfold speed increase seen from 1981 to 1989, going from 5 MHz to 33 MHz, would not be repeated.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#102

Post by KellyCriterion »

fabiensanglard wrote: post #2

The 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.

...and with 8 MB (-eight- for the youngsters ;-) RAM you were absolutely the king ruler :-D

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#103

Post by KellyCriterion »

blitzar wrote: post #6
fabiensanglard wrote: post #2

The 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.

They need to bring back the turbo button.

++1

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#104

Post by mayama »

jll29 wrote: post #80

• Ran my first Linux at home on a i486-DX2 (33 MHz, 4 MB RAM), which supported a decent X11/R6 performance in color in 1992, with a 14" CRT. • Ran my first real UNIX at home on a PA-RISC (HP 9000-715/75 with HP-UX 9.03 and 96 MB RAM) in 1997, 20" color CRT. • Today, Linux is still here, but on a 2-CPU, 140-core AMD server with 2 TB RAM, hundreds of TB NAS and a 40" TFT... (and it still takes too long to open the bloa…

> and it still takes too long to open the bloated Web browser! - keenly awaiting Ladybird to the rescue in August

chromium browsers launch pretty fast. If you're talking about memory usage, Ladybird isn't aimed at minimal memory usage from what I've seen.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#105

Post by KellyCriterion »

Raise your hand if you have been there and:

- tinkered for HOURS to get enough EMM/XMM memory by tweaking Config.Sys & Co to get whatever game running (and having dedicated boot options configured, because you could unload some drivers from mem and could then run other games)

:-D

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#106

Post by rwmj »

fabiensanglard wrote: post #2

The 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.

Slightly before DOOM came out, the killer 486 app for me was Fractint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractint)

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#107

Post by ssl-3 »

skerit wrote: post #7

It comes over as so incredibly insane to me that people from the late 80s (people working with computers! Reporting on them!) would look at their current technology stack and basically go: "I have no idea whatsoever what else we can do with these things, we've reached the end" The lack of imagination is just disturbing.

That's not so different than today, wherein:

All we really have to look forward to in the future of increasing-performance personal computing is doing the same things as yesterday, but doing them faster.

The future after today will probably turn out more interesting than that, of course, but we can't know that until it happens.

And the future after 1988 certainly turned out to be a very interesting time in computing -- but they had no idea what was in store. Perhaps you can use your time machine to go back and let them know?

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#109

Post by prmoustache »

whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #88
einr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Pentiums (socket 4, 60 or 66 MHz) had the infamous floating point division bug, had underwhelming perf for anything not FP bound (most things), ran hot, and were too expensive for what you got. A DX/4 100 was nearly always a more rational choice. Second gen Pentiums, starting with the 75 MHz, were great.

Idk if the 75 was really that great tho, mostly in that it had a 50Mhz FSB rather than 60 or 66Mhz like most other parts. Another factor for the later P1s being better IIRC was improved chipsets.

We had a 90 overclocked to 100Mhz that served as the family computer, I inherited from it when the family computer was upgraded to a K6 II and it chugged along as my personal computer until ~2001 thanks to Linux whike the Ghz barrier had been broken for a while already in the Intel world.

I think my next computer came with an AMD Duron 900Mhz, an entry level at the time but the jump from the pentium 100Mhz was such a huge gap it still felt like a formula 1.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#110

Post by ciupicri »

ryandrake wrote: post #84
theodorethomas wrote: post #43

The 486 and https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/history.html changed everything. Suddenly, it was possible to imagine running advanced software on a PC, and not have to spend 25,000 USD on a workstation.

It's hard to convey to today's generation, who think Ivy Bridge to Haswell was a big jump or whatever, how awesome the 286 -> 386 -> 486 changes were to personal computing. It felt almost like what going from a NES to a Super Nintendo to a N64 felt like. The improvements were astounding.

It wasn't a big jump, but it was a jump. Ivy Bridge lacks the instruction set required to run RHEL 10 [1]. The minimum supported microarchitecture level is x86-64-v3 and Ivy Bridge lacks AVX2 instructions.

[1]: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

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