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What came after the 486?

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Re: What came after the 486?

#141

Post by dspillett »

oleggromov wrote: post #128
dspillett wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. Those chips were excellent value for mostly integer work, but had incredibly poor floating-point performance which was a problem for gamers as the 3D era was really getting going around that time. I had one, it did me good service for a few years.

Not only performance, I strongly suspect there were issues with implementation too as the apps would just freeze/die frequently.

They were practically overclocked coming out of the factory, so if you had any issue at all with cooling, or attempted to clock them up even higher, they would be unstable.

Re: What came after the 486?

#142

Post by AdamN »

hulitu wrote: post #139
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…

> and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was). Was it though ? They made a new CPU from scratch, promissing to replace Alpha, PA-RISC and MIPS, but the first release was a flop. The only "win" of Itanium that I see, is that it eliminated some competitors in low and medium end server market: MIPS and PA-RISC, with SPARC being on life support.

I never used them but my understanding is that the performance was solid - but in a market with incumbents you don't just need to be as good as them you need to be significantly better or significantly cheaper. My sense was that it met expectations but that it wasn't enough for people to switch over.

Re: What came after the 486?

#143

Post by AdamN »

twoodfin wrote: post #108
NetMageSCW wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah they actually survived quite well. Who knows how much they put into Itanium but in the end they did pull the plug and Xeons dominated the market for years.

They even had a chance with mobile chips using ATOM but ARM was too compelling and I think Apple was sick of the Intel dependency so when there was an opportunity in the mobile space to not be so deeply tied to Intel they took it.

Re: What came after the 486?

#144

Post by gpderetta »

p_l wrote: post #133
gpderetta wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was i960 OoO?

Yes, with branch prediction and speculative execution too

Interesting, apparently it did scoreboarding like the CDC6600 and allowed multiple memory loads in flight, but I can't find a definite statement on whether it did renaming (I.e. writes to the same registers stalled). It might not be OoO as per modern definition, but is also not a fully on-order design.

Re: What came after the 486?

#146

Post by 1970-01-01 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #134
1970-01-01 wrote: post #80

That's quite a lot of words to say "Pentium" Sure AMD and a few others had back-seat answers, but Intel was literally driving the bus.

Intel was figuratively, not literally, driving the bus.

PCI wasn't IBM. Literally driving the bus, Intel was, did, done.

https://timeline.intel.com/1993/peripheral-component-interco...

Re: What came after the 486?

#147

Post by p_l »

hulitu wrote: post #139
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…

> and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was). Was it though ? They made a new CPU from scratch, promissing to replace Alpha, PA-RISC and MIPS, but the first release was a flop. The only "win" of Itanium that I see, is that it eliminated some competitors in low and medium end server market: MIPS and PA-RISC, with SPARC being on life support.

The deep and close relationship of Compaq with Intel meant that it also killed off Alpha, which unlike MIPS and PA-RISC wasn't going out by itself (Itanium was explicitly to be PA-RISC replacement, in fact it started as one, while SGI had issues with MIPS. SPARC was reeling from the radioactive cache scandal at the time but wasn't in as bad condition as MIPS, AFAIK)

Re: What came after the 486?

#148

Post by timw4mail »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #49
montroser wrote: post #44

I remember those Cyrix chips well. We had a little shop where we would assemble boxes to spec. And hey, a 486 is a 486, we reasoned. They were cheap, ran cool, and just about as fast as the others.

Me too, and I recall the Cyrix "Pentium-like" chips were cheaper and faster than Intel's actual Pentium chips! [1] [1] https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html

For the vast, vast majority of use cases, they are faster, yes.

Cyrix chips get too much hate because of Quake being optimized specifically for the Pentium and its FPU.

Re: What came after the 486?

#149

Post by timw4mail »

Anonasty wrote: post #9

The years when Pentium came was a bit of an shitshow. As the article said, there were 7 companies producing 486 processors but after that the market was mostly Intel, AMD and little Cyrix. Then came socket-A vs. slot-A etc. Now looking back it seems like there was lot of changes in short period of time.

Pentium-compatible processors were more numerous than you think.

- AMD (K5/K6/K6-2/K6-III) - Intel (Pentium) - Centaur (IDT Winchip, later Via C3/C7/Nano) - Cyrix (6x86, 6x86MX) - Rise (mp6)

Re: What came after the 486?

#150

Post by gsck »

nazgulsenpai wrote: post #96
zozbot234 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bought a XFX RX 580 that was used for cryptomining from eBay, used it for 3 years then handed it down to my son who used it for 2 more. It still worked when he removed it. Can confirm.

I used an AMD Radeon 7770 for years, then I upgraded to a GTX 1060, the 7770 became my younger sister's GPU for her PC. It has only recently gave out, after some 14 years of service.

Likewise for the 1060, its still going strong. I upgraded to a 3060 round about the time my younger brother decided he wanted a PC so he is now using it without any issues. About 10 years use out of it, plenty more to go.

GPUs are pretty damn resilient if you aren't pissing around with them.

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