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

What came after the 486?

dfarq.homeip.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 158 posts

Re: What came after the 486?

#31

Post by consp »

rasz wrote: post #14
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.

Things started progressing so fast in mid nineties that brand new top of the line computer was being matched in performance by low end offerings 2 years later. Lasted up to late 2000. December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s. January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133…

Fun thing is with a tiny bit of manipulation you can run a P3 tualatin at 1.33ghz via a slot adapter and some pin disablement and some voltage mods (or if you had the right adapter a jumper) in a motherboard which came with a low tier P2 or even earlier. So without replacing your Asus P2B from very early 1998 well up to mid 00s with astonishing performance gains, that motherboard had a massive lifespan in the right hands. Mine is still running with a new voltage regulator to this day.

Re: What came after the 486?

#32

Post by twoodfin »

consp wrote: post #28
twoodfin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the branding change, history will remember the Pentium (P5). It was really the Pentium Pro (P6) that put Intel leaps ahead on x86 microarchitecture, a lead they’d hold with only a few minor stumbles for two decades. Bob Colwell (mentioned elsewhere ITT) wrote a fascinating technical history of the P6: The Pentium Chronicles .

The major stumble being having to cross licence AMD for the x64 opcode design thus ensuring at least two players in the field (and due to how it's going only two).

They also started to slip behind AMD in the Pentium 4/NetBurst era, but got their footing back with Core (a more direct descendant of the P6 than the Pentium 4!)

Around the same time, but I’d classify as separate stumbles.

Re: What came after the 486?

#33

Post by twoodfin »

p_l wrote: post #27
phire wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find interesting is that Intel engineers actually designed their own 64-bit extension, somewhere along the same lines as AMD64. Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality. Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst ship…

Around the time of K8 being released, I remember reading official intel roadmaps announced to normal people, and they essentially planned that for at least few more years if not more they will segment into increasingly consumer-only 32bit and IA-64 on the higher end

Itanium was bonkers in lots of ways—very cool in others.

But this market segmentation idea just seems absolutely insane to me in a way I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain.

It requires Intel to voluntarily destroy the commodity economics that put their CPUs on a rocket ship to domination.

It’s as if they actually bought into the RISC FUD from the 1990’s that x86 was unscalable, exactly when it was taking its biggest leaps.

Re: What came after the 486?

#35

Post by mememememememo »

jl6 wrote: post #21
rasz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things started progressing so fast in mid nineties that brand new top of the line computer was being matched in performance by low end offerings 2 years later. Lasted up to late 2000. December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s. January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133…

It's so much fun living through the steep bit of an S curve that we imagine it might last forever...

Apple M chips?

Re: What came after the 486?

#37

Post by gpderetta »

irusensei wrote: post #29

Fun fact: Bonnel Atoms (D510 etc) were not affected by the meltdown vulnerability that plagued every Pentium processor since the 1995 Pentiums. These Atoms use purely in-order execution engines which kinda makes them supercharged 486s.

Pentium were the first superscalar x86 from intel, but were still in-order. Pentium-Pro (a completely different microarchitecture) was the first OoO intel x86 microarchitecture.

Re: What came after the 486?

#38

Post by jabl »

squater wrote: post #17
chasil wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am correct, the Pentium Pro was the first "out of order" design. It specialized in 32-bit code, and did not handle 16-bit code very well. The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance. AMD actually made successful CPUs based on Berkeley RISC, similar to SPARC (they used register windows). The AMD K5 had this RISC CPU at its…

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.

Re: What came after the 486?

#39

Post by jhbadger »

gabrielsroka wrote: post #3
stevefan1999 wrote: post #2

Ah the pentium, aka 5-ium due to the penta- prefix. It is actually a nod from 4 to 5, but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium. But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.

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!

Re: What came after the 486?

#40

Post by AdamN »

thisisidiotic wrote: post #5

Yea I'll take "Things that make me feel old for $1000 Alex."

I remember not believing my friend when he said that the OS and the games were inside the computer and didn't need to be loaded up via a floppy disk. That was my first time seeing a hard drive.
Post reply on HN