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PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

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Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#111

Post by ubercore »

y1n0 wrote: post #103
majormajor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral. SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 col…

For me, at 52, I recall the SSD transformation to be near miraculous. I never once felt that way about a CPU upgrade until getting an M1. I went from a cyrix 5x86 133 (which was effectively a fast 486) to a pentium II 266 and it just wasn't that impressive. The drag down of swapping became almost a non-issue with the SSD changeover. I suppose going from a //e to a IIgs was that kind of leap but that was more about th…

I went 386 DX 33 to a Pentium 75, which wasn't a wild amount of time. I'd argue that's way bigger than when I got an SSD (but I agree SSD was a huge improvement).

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#112

Post by rr808 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #98
myself248 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgrading and Repairing PCs 4th edition even says directly, that some shady resellers will put a heatsink on a chip that they're running beyond spec, but that Intel designs all their processors to run at rated speed without one.

I've never seen a Xeon without a heat sink, I don't believe they are designed to run without one.

The first Xeon looks to be released 1998, so sounds about right

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#113

Post by giantrobot »

jmyeet wrote: post #43
xnx wrote: post #7

The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

That wasn't how it worked. Up until the 486, the clock speed and bus speed were basically the same and topped out at about 33MHz (IIRC). The 486 started the thing of making the CPU speed a multiple of the bus speed eg 486dx2/66 (33MHz CPU, 66MHz bus), 486dx4/100 (25MHz CPU, 100MHz bus). And that's continued to this day (kind of). But the point is the CPU became a lot faster than the IO speed, including memory. So the…

You got your multipliers backwards with the 486dx. The multipliers was on the CPU core rather than the bus. A dx2 was twice the memory bus speed. The dx4 was (confusingly) three times the bus speed. So a 486dx4/100 was a 33MHz bus with a 100MHz core.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#114

Post by random3 »

Razengan wrote: post #109
random3 wrote: post #60

Fun times. Coolers, paste, fans, supply watts, dip switches and jumpers. Quake, Voodoo 3dfx vs NVidia GForce. This is where it all started, kids. I was in high school and was running a "computer games club" (~ Internet cafe for games and kids) since 1998 when we got a place, renovated it ourselves, got custom built furniture (cheap narrow desks) and initially 6 computers - AMDs at 300Mhz. By 2000 we broke a wall in t…

> This is where it all started, kids. Nah.. Cassettes, computers-in-a-keyboard, booting straight into BASIC.. THIS is where it all started, grandkids.

Hahaha! True. I was pointing out the beginnings of modern GPUs and NVidia, but yes heard the cassette screeching before the modem screeching indeed.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#115

Post by giantrobot »

johnflan wrote: post #88
layer8 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the plus side, the 486DX-33 didn’t require active cooling. The second half of the 1990s was when home computing started to become noisy, and the art of trying to build silent PCs began.

The CPU didn’t but the chonker of a fan in the PSU sure made up for it

AND THOSE WHISPERING QUIET HARD DRIVES!

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#116

Post by anthk »

idiotsecant wrote: post #42
dlcarrier wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law ) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each in…

This is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less hay than a horse did.

Debian Sarge, Kopete with KDE3: 256M of RAM, AMD Athlon 2000.

Windows 11, Discord: 4GB are not enough to run it well.

FYI, Kopete allowed inline LaTeX, Youtube videos (low res, ok, 480p maybe, but it worked), emoticos, animations, videoconference, themes, maybe basic HTML tags and whatnot. And it ran fast.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#117

Post by jasomill »

SoftTalker wrote: post #98
myself248 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgrading and Repairing PCs 4th edition even says directly, that some shady resellers will put a heatsink on a chip that they're running beyond spec, but that Intel designs all their processors to run at rated speed without one.

I've never seen a Xeon without a heat sink, I don't believe they are designed to run without one.

Indeed, even the oldest, slowest Xeons shipped in SECC cartridges with integrated heatsinks.

But that was several years after the book cited by the GP was published (1994, shortly after the release of the original Pentium).

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#118

Post by Aurornis »

varispeed wrote: post #46
xnx wrote: post #7

The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

I don't know. I felt this way when switching from Intel laptop to Apple M1. I am still using it today and I prefer it over desktop PC.

I also went from an Intel MacBook Pro to an M1 and appreciated it, but that leap was exaggerated by how bad the last few generations of Intel MacBook Pros were.

The Apple Silicon chassis was allowed to finally house an appropriate cooling solution, too. They are much quieter than the same Intel laptops when dissipating the same power levels.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#119

Post by IshKebab »

majormajor wrote: post #48
dlcarrier wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law ) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each in…

Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral. SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 col…

Nah I agree with him. Spinning disks were always a huge bottleneck (remember how long MS Word took to open?) and SSD's basically fixed that overnight. The CPU advancements were big, but software had a chance to "catch up" (i.e. get less efficient) because they it was a gradual change. That didn't really happen with SSDs because the change was so sudden and big.

I'd say software never really "caught up" to the general slowness that we had to endure in the HDD era either. Even my 14 year old desktop starts Word in a few seconds compared to upwards of 60s in the 90s.

The closest I've seen is the shitty low end Samsung Android tablet we got for our kids. It's soooo slow and laggy. I suspect it's the storage. And that was actually and upgrade over the Amazon Fire tablet we used to have which was so slow it was literally unusable. Again I suspect slow storage is the culprit.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#120

Post by Aurornis »

philistine wrote: post #73
embedding-shape wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used proper desktop computers? I suppose such a move would feel significant if you've mostly been using laptops.

But that's the thing; a laptop is fundamentally different. Of course if there's the equivalent of a thermopump under my desk I'm going to get crazy performance. The magic was that Apple brought the uncompromised experience to a laptop.

> The magic was that Apple brought the uncompromised experience to a laptop.

Apple’s power efficiency was a great bump forward, but the performance claims were a little exaggerated. I love my Apple Silicon devices but I still switch over to a desktop for GPU work because it’s so much faster, for example.

Apple had that famously misleading chart where they showed their M1 GPU keeping pace with a flagship nVidia card that misled everyone at launch. In practice they’re not even close to flagship desktop accelerators, unfortunately.

They have excellent idle power consumption though. Great for a laptop.

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