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What came after the 486?

dfarq.homeip.net

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Re: What came after the 486?

#111

Post by aaroninsf »

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'…

Fellow AMD fan here—it wasn't that long ago that I finally relinquished the old ABIT motherboard that overclocked my AMD badboy to eke out extra cycles for my DAW.

Also, for Half Life.

Re: What came after the 486?

#112

Post by snarfy »

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 recall these being referred to as KMD

Re: What came after the 486?

#113

Post by twoodfin »

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.)

The cartridge-style packaging of the Pentium II/III’s was also peak for the lineup.

My favorite PC I ever built was a dual-CPU Tyan motherboard that eventually held two screaming fast Coppermines. Needed a university copy of Windows 2000 to really make them sing—the Windows 95 series never supported SMP—and it was glorious.

Re: What came after the 486?

#114

Post by kube-system »

jhbadger wrote: post #39
gabrielsroka wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trademarks > The name invoked the number five, but was completely trademarkable, unlike the number 586.

I remember when IBM was upset that various companies were calling their 80286 computers " AT" like the IBM AT ("advanced technology"). But you can't trademark a preposition!

It's not that simple -- you can definitely trademark a preposition. Go search USPTO, it's not hard to find some: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90234636

Re: What came after the 486?

#115

Post by twoodfin »

jabl wrote: post #38
squater wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small correction, Pentium Pro was the first OoO microprocessor from Intel. Others like IBM POWER1 came earlier

OoO is a surprisingly old idea, first used in the IBM System/360 Model 91 released all the way back in 1966. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasulo's_algorithm Took a while until transistor budgets allowed it to be implemented in consumer microprocessors.

Also for the gap between CPU speed and memory speed to matter enough for it to be worthwhile.

Re: What came after the 486?

#116

Post by badc0ffee »

bluedino wrote: post #78

The worst part about the 486 name was all the varieties, an uninformed consumer could get a real lemon. The author links to an example: https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-486slc2-cpu-when-a-clone-isnt-a... You then had the 486 DLCs which were even worse. you'd get companies that sold 386 and even 286 systems with '486' chips, constrained by slow, 16-bit buses, etc.

The 486DLC was fully 32 bit. The 286/386SX-like model with a 16 bit bus was the 486SLC.

But, even a 486SLC wasn't all that bad at the time. It was still much faster than a 386DX for many things (DOOM, for example).

These AT-like machines limited users to 16-bit ISA cards for expansion, and a 24-bit address bus (16 MB RAM). But how many consumer PCs used more than that, back when your 32-bit bus options were VLB (video only), MCA (IBM only), or EISA (expensive servers/workstations only).

Re: What came after the 486?

#117

Post by lossyalgo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #63
homebrewer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those sellers never disappeared; although I'm from not from Paraguay, the situation is familiar. These days they're selling desktops built on 10+ year old Xeons which you can buy for dirt cheap on AliExpress, installed on frankenstein motherboards from noname Chinese manufacturers which are desktop-oriented, but take server processors. The graphics card is something old like RX480, and comes from being run into the g…

The notion that GPU chips can be "run into the ground" by years of crypto mining or AI workloads has been debunked pretty thoroughly by now. The hardware is quite resilient, it doesn't really fail at a higher rate.

Also any miner worth their salt knows to undervolt to save power (=money), run cooler, last longer, and run at very close to full speed or even in some cases 100% full-speed, depending on silicon "lottery".

Re: What came after the 486?

#118

Post by MattGrommes »

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 another go. I got that project done. :)

Re: What came after the 486?

#119

Post by moefh »

dice wrote: post #73
wodenokoto wrote: post #64

Something something Intel tried to add 100 to 486, got 585.97858475858473737272747837 and just called it pentium

0xf00fc7c8

Shouldn't that be 0xc8c70ff0, since we're talking about a little-endian CPU? (according to this[1] the bytes in memory are F0 0F C7 C8).

On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have recognized the F00F bug mention if you had actually written 0xc8c70ff0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug

Re: What came after the 486?

#120

Post by tracker1 »

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'…

I had an AMD 5x86 @133 that lasted me several years... I had the secondary cache module and 64mb of ram, which was a lot for the time. It wasn't great for gaming, but general productivity software and just simple web browsing it was kind of a beast from the ram/cache performance. The next computer I really remember was an OC'd AMD Duron at 1ghz.
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