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Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

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Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#151

Post by vardump »

koutakun wrote: post #146
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio, video, and 3D animation are still extremely processor intensive. You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those. Office tools and web browsing are less demanding.

> You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those But you can get way better results with the lowest end computers than you could years ago. Back in the 90s my grandfather used 3DS Max to map out his future apartment's rooms and start planning furniture, using renders to get an idea of how sunshine would look like at different times, etc. At the time, he did this on an expensive 486 that would tak…

"Nowadays I can do the same with a free copy of Blender and any reasonably modern integrated GPU in probably under an hour."

Try seconds or at most minutes.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#154

Post by ge96 »

accrual wrote: post #149
ge96 wrote: post #75

Funny I'm working with intel 686 right now brutal to get stuff to build eg. rust/cargo related (missing deps but mostly the hardware, slow). Recently trying to fix this maturin problem I ran into. But it is cool the backwards compatibility of python 3.11 to 32bit with debian 12 The CPU I'm working with is Celeron M 900MHz single core no HT struggling to build wheels for python (several hours)

It's great Python is/was well supported on i686. Node on the other hand almost immediately started requiring SSE2 even in the earliest versions. Have not found success with Node + Pentium III yet, maybe need to build an earlier version myself.

I got it to work on Intel 270 but that has HT and 1.6GHz still slow (hours to build wheels) specifically temporalio and cryptography.

Yeah node is usually my go to love JS

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#155

Post by smallstepforman »

whizzter wrote: post #41
TMWNN wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commodore so slowly and ineffectually improving on the OCS didn't help, but the original sin of the Amiga was committed in the beginning, with planar graphics (i.e., slow and hard to work with, even setting aside HAM) and TV-oriented resolutions/refresh rates (i.e., users needing to buy a "flicker fixer"). It's like they looked at one of the most important reasons for the PC and Mac's success—a gorgeous, rock-solid m…

Iirc interlaced display and 6 bitplanes were a compromise to allow color graphics in 1985 with the memory bandwidths available at the time. If it's a sin or feature can of course be debated but I remember playing games on an Amiga in the early 90s and until Doom the graphics capabilities didn't look outdated. By 1992 with AGA however I agree, flicker and planar graphics(with 8 bitplanes any total memory bandwidth gai…

5 sins in 1992: - 8 bit planar instead of chunky - progressive display (vs interlaced) - sound was not 16-bit - should have been 68030 with mmu support (vs 68020ec) - HD mandatory.

If they addressed this, the Doom experience would have run better on Amiga.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#156

Post by bananaflag »

wiremine wrote: post #81

My first computer was a 486sx 25Mhz [1] The rig (tower, monitor, etc.) cost around $3,000. We got the SX instead of the DX because it was $500 cheaper. And I wanted a 16bit sound card. (Note that this is in 1992 dollars. Today it would cost over $7,000) My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsigh…

John Dvorak has tons of short sighted articles.

I wanted to link his columns "Microsoft Dot Nyet" and "New Architecture Needed" from circa 2000-2001 but it turns out they have been memory-holed. They should be somewhere in the wayback machine.

EDIT: At least one of them has not been deleted, just his name has been removed

https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#157

Post by Zardoz84 »

einr wrote: post #90
cout wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 5x86 had more to do with marketing than anything else, because the Pentium had already been on the market for a while when the Am5x86 came out.

I think it’s a bit of both. It absolutely tried very hard to pretend that it was a ”586” (Pentium class) but also ”5x” is right there and implies that if the DX4 is 4, this is 5. The full name on the chip on some of them is ”Am5x86-P75 DX5-133” which implies a lot of things, some of which are flat out misleading (it does not get very close to ”P75” performance)

I had one of these back on the day. A very fine 486

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#158

Post by Zardoz84 »

mikestorrent wrote: post #99
einr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Pentiums (socket 4, 60 or 66 MHz) had the infamous floating point division bug, had underwhelming perf for anything not FP bound (most things), ran hot, and were too expensive for what you got. A DX/4 100 was nearly always a more rational choice. Second gen Pentiums, starting with the 75 MHz, were great.

I had a P60 that had the F0 0F bug; Windows would crash for weird reasons on it, but Linux ran like a champ because it actually had a workaround. Luckily my chip was already recalled for the FDIV bug so it wasn't a total boat anchor. Loved that machine. I had BeOS, QNX, and one time I made Linux look like Solaris with all the Open Look stuff - really enjoyed that aesthetic. Now we have these amazing displays and grap…

Didn't do you try again Linux recently?

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#159

Post by Zardoz84 »

jll29 wrote: post #80

• Ran my first Linux at home on a i486-DX2 (33 MHz, 4 MB RAM), which supported a decent X11/R6 performance in color in 1992, with a 14" CRT. • Ran my first real UNIX at home on a PA-RISC (HP 9000-715/75 with HP-UX 9.03 and 96 MB RAM) in 1997, 20" color CRT. • Today, Linux is still here, but on a 2-CPU, 140-core AMD server with 2 TB RAM, hundreds of TB NAS and a 40" TFT... (and it still takes too long to open the bloa…

I remember compiling Linux Kernel on SuSE 6.3 on a AMD 486DX5 133mhz ... good times , and I don't forget to do "make mrpropper"

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#160

Post by DarkUranium »

bananaflag wrote: post #156
wiremine wrote: post #81

My first computer was a 486sx 25Mhz [1] The rig (tower, monitor, etc.) cost around $3,000. We got the SX instead of the DX because it was $500 cheaper. And I wanted a 16bit sound card. (Note that this is in 1992 dollars. Today it would cost over $7,000) My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsigh…

John Dvorak has tons of short sighted articles. I wanted to link his columns "Microsoft Dot Nyet" and "New Architecture Needed" from circa 2000-2001 but it turns out they have been memory-holed. They should be somewhere in the wayback machine. EDIT: At least one of them has not been deleted, just his name has been removed https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570

Yikes, you're not wrong. And I guess he's never heard of security issues, what with his ROM idea. Neat for a console (where the ROMs are game cartridges, as they used to be) or an appliance not connected to the internet, not a general-purpose OS...

Pretty much the only thing I agree with is that computer architecture could use a complete rework (both from a software as well as hardware side, though primarily the former); as well as said rework being basically impossible in practice.

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