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What came after the 486?

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Re: What came after the 486?

#51
post #14
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…

> December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s.

Ah, I remember the days of Intel's fabs doing “too good” a job and many more chips passing tests for faster use being produced than expected. To fulfil orders for the slower chips some of these better batches were marked down and sold as slower units, so if you were lucky you could really push the overclocking and get yourself a performance bargain. You also needed a good motherboard and quality RAM to pull it off reliably, of course.

Sillyrons is what we used to call the massively overclocked Celerons. At Uni a friend of mine made a good bit of pocket money from selling an optimisation service, for people who didn't feel confident playing with such settings themselves.

Re: What came after the 486?

#52

Ah. There's a whole generation of people who never enjoyed the Intel inside / Pentium jingle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU

Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium.

I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.

Re: What came after the 486?

#55
I was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was my first time trying the new SDRAM! After that I FINALLY got a legit Pentium III 400Mhz! I could go on and on as this is a lovely walk down memory lane and there's been some fun dips back into AMD Athlon/Ryzen/etc.

Re: What came after the 486?

#56
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, TBH it wasn't all FUD - hanging on to x86 eventually (much later) came back to bite them when x86 CPUs weren't competitive for tablets and smartphones, leading to Apple developing their own ARM-based RISC CPUs (which run circles around the previous x86 CPUs) and dumping Intel altogether.

It is interesting how so much of the speculation in those days was about how x86 was a dead end because it couldn’t scale up, but the real issue ended up being that it didn’t scale down.

Re: What came after the 486?

#57

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.

Self-correction: Pentium MMX is still i586, it is Pentium Pro that is i686, the confusion is real.

Re: What came after the 486?

#58

I was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was m…

> 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.

Re: What came after the 486?

#59

I remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day. Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purch…

Those sellers never disappeared; although I'm from not from Paraguay, the situation is familiar. These days they're selling desktops built on 10+ year old Xeons which you can buy for dirt cheap on AliExpress, installed on frankenstein motherboards from noname Chinese manufacturers which are desktop-oriented, but take server processors. The graphics card is something old like RX480, and comes from being run into the ground by years of crypto"currency" mining, then resoldered on a new board, also often developed by Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.

Graphics cards especially are very unreliable and frequently die within a few months of purchase. But when you can buy a whole PC for the price of one modern videocard, many don't have a choice.

https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-intel-xeon-processors.htm...

https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-motherboards-xeon.html

https://aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-amd-radeon-rx-580.html

Re: What came after the 486?

#60

I was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was m…

> 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.

Yeah, I was all about recording music/running the first iteration of software synths. I was a Graphic Design major at that time so Photoshop/Illustrator/QuarkXpress were my jam. Those suprisingly didn't run that bad - in real Graphic Design, no one used Eyecandy (the reason everything on the web in 1998 had drop shadows, outter glows, lens flares) so rendering "3D" rarely came into play.
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