Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 162 posts

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

#131

Post by nunez »

Twirrim wrote: post #122
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.

That must've been an even bigger jump since Celerons were notably slower than PIIs.

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

#132

Post by kelnos »

dlcarrier wrote: post #65
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…

That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster, so you had to upgrade to a new CPU every few years to run the latest software. With SSDs, there was a huge overlap in CPU speeds that may or may not have an SSD, so upgrading to one meant a huge performance boost, within the same set of runnable software. Also, going from Sim City to Sim City 2000 was pre-bloat. Over t…

I wouldn't call that bloat; certainly we've been complaining about software bloat as long as I've been into computers, but at that time, software was simply pushing the capabilities of the hardware, and often running into walls.

These days, we value developer productivity over performance optimization, so we have stuff like Electron apps. The reason behind it is that CPUs (and RAM quantity, for the most part) are so far ahead of regular desktop applications that it doesn't matter. In the 80s and 90s, the hardware could barely keep up with decently-optimized software that wanted to do anything interesting.

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

#133

Post by nunez »

crims0n wrote: post #106
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…

You reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying. I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good…

They sure were. Building is what got me into this crazy field. Abusing VBscript (and myself in the process) got me into my software developer era later on!

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

#134

Post by trailbits »

qsi wrote: post #125
aurareturn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Hey, moving from cassette tape to floppy was also pretty awesome - random access speed demon!

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

#135

Post by rr808 »

iknowstuff wrote: post #86
rr808 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a temporary dumb hack.

Well it kinda was! seeing how power efficient iPhone chips are despite hovering the top of single core benchmarks.

Nice, I didn't think of that. I love the fanless trend in Apple macbook airs.

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

#136

Post by PearlRiver »

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…

I was a PC gamer in the late 90s. It was very expensive. Nowadays you can build a nice rig and you can be sure to play all the latest games for 5 years.

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

#137

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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 from a 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986 to a Mac LCII in 1992 with a 68030/16 MHz LCII. That was the last time I felt a step change in day to day work. Of course things like games, video and audio encoding got faster.

The next time I felt a step change was the M series of Macs. P

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

#138

Post by smackeyacky »

dale_glass wrote: post #121
dlcarrier wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the poster was partly being facetious about being corrected on the internet.

Agile has turned out to be terrible in most organisations I’ve worked at. From officious PMs demanding stupidly mismatched sprints vs the deliverables, to the use of story points as a baseball bat of invented malarkey instead of proper estimation. The useless ceremonies that aren’t tuned to the state of the project. The fantasy land of ill specified tickets and terrible business analysis landing on developers.

Not all of that is purely due to agile but the ephemeral nature of sprints seem to encourage terrible behaviour from the non technical parts of the project management cycle.

I hate it.

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

#139

Post by apitman »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #94
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…

My first pc I built was with an AMD athlon 64 4000+ and a GeForce 6600GT. Going to that from an e-machines piece of junk was INSANE. It’s so hard to come up with a similar experience shift nowadays. Even websites seemed to load instantly with the same DSL connection. Everything felt soooooo good.

This is very close to my fist build. I believe 3600+ in my case.

Edit: ok I looked it up because I was curious and newegg never deletes anything from order history. Athlon 64 3200+ and 6600GT. Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I got a great deal on a case+enermax power supply at Fry's Electronics.

Post reply on HN