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What came after the 486?

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Re: What came after the 486?

#101

Post by absolute8606 »

geocrasher wrote: post #93

My first PC was a 286/12 with an AMD chip in it. I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario. In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant. Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn'…

Oh man, my first custom build had a Phenom II 955 BE. Overclocked beautifully, I loved that system. Got it in a barebones kit from good old TigerDirect, RIP

Re: What came after the 486?

#103

Post by EvanAnderson »

Second only to getting an SSD in my 2006-vintage laptop the AMD 5x86 was the best upgrade I ever put in a computer, dollars for performance. It made my 486SX-25 run like a 75Mhz+ Pentium. Linux kernel builds flew after that. I also fondly remember seeing little bits of "Second Reality" run better or show me things I'd never seen before (more of the sword extending further from the pool, as an example).

Re: What came after the 486?

#104

Post by karim79 »

Oof I'm old enough to remember the Cyrix chips. They were cheaper than the other players, which lured in a lot of people who then regretted it once they realised that they were constantly crashing hot-garbage. Good times.

Re: What came after the 486?

#105

Post by bitwize »

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.)

P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.

RISC architecture is gonna change everything.

Re: What came after the 486?

#106

Post by twoodfin »

phire wrote: post #61
twoodfin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 biggest leaps. That's exactly what was happening. Though it helps to realise that this argument was taking place inside Intel around 1997. The Pentium II is only just hitting the market, it wasn't exactly obvious that x86 was right in the middle making its biggest leaps. RISC was absolutely domi…

I wonder what their engineers thought.

Re: What came after the 486?

#107

Post by SoftTalker »

AdamN wrote: post #40
thisisidiotic wrote: post #5

Yea I'll take "Things that make me feel old for $1000 Alex."

I remember not believing my friend when he said that the OS and the games were inside the computer and didn't need to be loaded up via a floppy disk. That was my first time seeing a hard drive.

First hard drive I bought for a PC was 20MB. I remember thinking how I would never fill it.

Re: What came after the 486?

#108

Post by twoodfin »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #82
AdamN wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

Steve Jobs quote seems appropriate and yet still hard for companies to learn: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will"

In the end, Intel did cannibalize themselves. It wasn’t too long after the Itanium launch that Intel was publicly presenting a roadmap that had Xeons as the appealing mass-market server product.

Re: What came after the 486?

#109

Post by giantrobot »

patwolf wrote: post #52
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

Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium. I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.

I have a bunny suit plushie on my shelf to this day. The other Pentium marketing blitz I remember was in the 1998 Lost in Space which had a TV ad for a Pentium XXI or something. Also notable was the Silicon Graphics branding in that movie. Which I have always found amusing since SGI didn't have any consumer products and even for businesses the prices were "Call Us" which has always meant eye watering expensive.

Re: What came after the 486?

#110

Post by mtzaldo »

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.)

You can watch Serial Experiments Lain. It is an anime from 1998.
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