I bought a whole bunch of parts with my first Athlon. I think I bought a Soundblaster, and a Radeon GFX card if I am remembering the timeline right. The soundblaster came with a demo of a Lara Croft game that used the then incredible spatial audio processing to great effect. The industry promptly forgot about that technology, and to this day game audio rarely matches the potential of real time spatial dynamics that we once reached 20 years ago.
PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
61–70 of 162 posts
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#62The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
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…
Agree 100%. the compute was always bottlenecked by insanely high i/o latency. SSDs opened up fast computers like no processor ever did.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#63I upgraded to this exact CPU from a 200MHz pentium in the fall of 2000. Easily the largest jump in performance of any upgrade I've ever done.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#64Earlier 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…
> 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. For me they were. I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD. I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop. Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (t…
Sure, but what about once Photoshop was open? Aka where you spend most of your day after you start up your stuff?
Would you take the SSD and a 500Mhz processor or a 2Ghz dual-core with a 7200k or 10000k HD? "Some operations are faster" vs "every single thing is wildly faster" of the every-few-years quadrupling+ of CPU perf, memory amounts, disk space, etc.
(45sec to load Photoshop also isn't tracking with my memory, though 30s-1min boot certainly is, but I'm not invested enough to go try to dig up my G4 PowerBook and test it out... :) )
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#65Earlier 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…
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 the course of five years, the new version was significantly better than the original, but they both target the same 486 processor generation, which was brand new when the original SimCity was released, but rather old by the time SimCity 2000 was released. Another five years later, Sim City 3000 added minimal functionality, but required not just a Pentium processor, but a fast one.
I guess what I'm getting at is that a faster CPU means programs released after it will run better, but faster storage means that all programs, old and new, will run better.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#66What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
There have been overclockers who reached 9GHz using liquid helium.
It's simply impossible at room temperatures without extreme cooling.
Also you will run into interconnect speed issues, since 10GHz corresponds to .1 nanoseconds which corresponds to 3 centimeters (assuming lightspeed, in reality this is lower).
So sadly, we'll be stuck in this "clock-speed winter" for a little longer.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#67The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
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…
I mean, HDD were much faster than floppy disks. Which were in turn much faster than tape cassettes. And so on...
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#68The craziest thing is, I don't actually know how many gigahertz either my PC or my macbook are. The megahertz race used to fierce!
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#69Earlier 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…
> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster
I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance.
For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.
Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I would not call that bloat.
On the other hand, comparing MS Teams to say ICQ, yeah, a lot of that is bloat.
Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
#70Fun times. Coolers, paste, fans, supply watts, dip switches and jumpers. Quake, Voodoo 3dfx vs NVidia GForce. This is where it all started, kids. I was in high school and was running a "computer games club" (~ Internet cafe for games and kids) since 1998 when we got a place, renovated it ourselves, got custom built furniture (cheap narrow desks) and initially 6 computers - AMDs at 300Mhz. By 2000 we broke a wall in t…
Finding high school kids with a similar "tech" background today seems really hard. Tech users, sure, chronic phone / game addicts are everywhere, but that tweaker spirit is rare