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What came after the 486?

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Re: What came after the 486?

#61

Post by phire »

twoodfin wrote: post #33
p_l wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's exactly what was happening.

Though it helps to realise that this argument was taking place inside Intel around 1997. The Pentium II is only just hitting the market, it wasn't exactly obvious that x86 was right in the middle making its biggest leaps.

RISC was absolutely dominating the server/workstation space, this was slightly before the rise of the cheap x86 server. Intel management was desperate to break into the server/workstation space, and they knew they needed a high end RISC cpu. It was kind of general knowledge in the computer space at the time that RISC was the future.

Re: What came after the 486?

#63

Post by zozbot234 »

homebrewer wrote: post #59
sombragris wrote: post #50

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 g…

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.

Re: What came after the 486?

#65

Post by sombragris »

homebrewer wrote: post #59
sombragris wrote: post #50

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 g…

Well, a lot of people here would have loved to have 10-year old Xeons in their motherboards; while power hungry, I guess they would make good CPUs since they have good cache sizes. But no, there's no Xeons in our offers here. What people get here now are Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs, or N-class CPUs, with the onboard GPU only, 4GB RAM and 1 TB HDD running unlicensed Windows with understandable results. But when you are a digitally illiterate parent seeking to purchase a first PC for your children of school age, this looks attractive enough at a good price point.

Re: What came after the 486?

#67

Post by irusensei »

gpderetta wrote: post #37
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.

I stand corrected thanks.

Re: What came after the 486?

#68

Post by rasz »

twoodfin wrote: post #32
consp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

During P4 Intel kept their footing with bribes. Article touches on this

"Some companies, notably Dell, remained Intel-only well into the 21st century,"

Dell was receiving $1Billion a year in bribes from Intel https://247wallst.com/consumer-electronics/2007/02/02/michea...

"The documents filed in District Court claim that there were $1 billion in kickbacks and payments."

That was the only way to make big boys plunge into Pentium 4 with Rambus fiasco.

Re: What came after the 486?

#70

Post by xoxxala »

AdamN wrote: post #40
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.

My very first hard drive was for an Apple //gs. It was the size of a shoebox and was a whopping 5 megabytes. I was an Egghead employee at the time and after my employee discount, it was something like $600-$700.
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