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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

#121

Post by dale_glass »

dlcarrier wrote: post #54
gavinsyancey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.

You joke, but it really is more work. Iv'e developed software in languages from assembly language to JavaScript, and for any given functionality it's been easier to write it in RISC assembly language running directly than to get something working reliably in JavaScript running on a framework in an interpreter in a VM in a web browser, where it's impossible to reliably know what a call is going to do, because everythi…

What makes Agile the most-wrong way to manage, in your opinion? I'm curious.

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

#122

Post by Twirrim »

nunez wrote: post #72

What a time to be a kid then. We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that! I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newe…

I had a similar speed jump, went from a Celeron 233 to the Athlon 1Ghz. Such a huge uplift.

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

#123

Post by Tanoc »

dlcarrier wrote: post #54
gavinsyancey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.

You joke, but it really is more work. Iv'e developed software in languages from assembly language to JavaScript, and for any given functionality it's been easier to write it in RISC assembly language running directly than to get something working reliably in JavaScript running on a framework in an interpreter in a VM in a web browser, where it's impossible to reliably know what a call is going to do, because everythi…

Even with older lower level languages like C and COBOL '02 it's easier to do simple things like find a file, read the file, and draw the file on the screen as a raster image using a resizable canvas than it is to write the JavaScript to do the same thing.

The mangling of JavaScript to fit through every hole seems to be the biggest mistake made in modern programming, and I'm not sure what even keeps it going aside from momentum. At first it regained ground because Flash was going EOL, but now?

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

#124

Post by bigDinosaur »

aurareturn wrote: post #110
y1n0 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree. There were only 2 game changing upgrades for me. One was hard disk to SSD. The other was x86 laptop to M1.

You really didn't feel Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo was a 'game changer'?

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

#125

Post by qsi »

aurareturn wrote: post #110
y1n0 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree. There were only 2 game changing upgrades for me. One was hard disk to SSD. The other was x86 laptop to M1.

Moving from floppy disk to hard disk was pretty big for me. :)

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

#126

Post by s0rce »

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.

Then Windows 11 came along to slow everything down and we are back to the stoneage.

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

#127

Post by sys_64738 »

This was an era where Intel were humiliated by AMD and that caused Intel to execute with precision and direction. Intel's biggest problem is when they're a marketing company first and an engineering company later. When they come from behind then the engineering wins. They can't lead because marketing dictates their direction.

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

#128

Post by beAbU »

myself248 wrote: post #76
oso2k wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same inclination back in the 90s when I upgraded my Cyrix 486 SLC2 50MHz without a heat sink (which seems like a no-no in retrospect) to Cyrix MediaGX 133MHz. The stocker fan was immediately noticeable. I thought I had done something wrong.

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 had a PC with an old PII or PIII cartridge.

The cpu and heatsink was fully integrated into what looked like a NES cart, with an integrated fan and everything. It was not really possible to separate the cpu and the heatsink as the locking mechanism to keep the cart in place on the motherboard interfaced with the heatsink assembly.

So I'm a little dubious of that no-heatsink claim.

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

#129

Post by ponector »

s0rce wrote: post #126
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.

Then Windows 11 came along to slow everything down and we are back to the stoneage.

Got recently a new surface laptop at work - windows 11 gives me the same feeling I had from Vista. Hilarious how modern computers are more powerful than ever, but windows 11 now feels worse than windows 7 ten years ago.

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

#130

Post by kelnos »

dlcarrier wrote: post #33
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.

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…

> In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact.

When SSDs became mainstream, yes, I agree they had a bigger impact than any CPU speed increases at that particular time.

But back in the double-digit MHz days of CPU speeds, upgrading your CPU was king when it came to better performance, and I'd argue that effect was more pronounced than the the HDD to SSD transition was. It's hard to convey what huge jumps CPUs were making during that time period, and how big a difference it made.

I also remember a time, somewhere in the middle of that, when adding more RAM could be a bigger boost than a CPU upgrade. But back in the 80s and 90s (and prior, but I have no personal experience with that), there was only so much RAM you could add, and the CPU was still often what was holding you back.

But CPUs just haven't been the bottleneck for most home user workloads for a long time now. These days when I buy a new laptop, I certainly want the best CPU I can get, but I'm more concerned about how much RAM I can put in it, and the iGPU's specs. (SSDs are a given, so I don't need to think much about it.)

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