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

PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 162 posts

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#71

Post by oso2k »

rr808 wrote: post #36
xnx wrote: post #7

The 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.

I still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a temporary dumb hack.

I had the same inclination back in the 90s when I upgraded my Cyrix 486 SLC2 50MHz without a heat sink (which seems like a no-no in retrospect) to Cyrix MediaGX 133MHz. The stocker fan was immediately noticeable. I thought I had done something wrong.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#72

Post by nunez »

What a time to be a kid then.

We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that!

I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newegg and _this processor_. With some help from my uncle and a guide I printed from somewhere whose website started with '3D' (it was quite popular back then; I don't think it exists anymore), I got it done.

Going from 233 MHz to this was like going from walking to flying in a jet! Everything was SO MUCH F**ING FASTER. Windows XP _flew_. (The DEC barely made the minimum requirements for it, and boy did I feel it.) Trying to install Longhorn on it a year or two later brought me back into walking again, though. :D

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#73

Post by philistine »

embedding-shape wrote: post #55
varispeed wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I felt this way when switching from Intel laptop to Apple M1. I am still using it today and I prefer it over desktop PC.

Have you ever used proper desktop computers? I suppose such a move would feel significant if you've mostly been using laptops.

But that's the thing; a laptop is fundamentally different. Of course if there's the equivalent of a thermopump under my desk I'm going to get crazy performance. The magic was that Apple brought the uncompromised experience to a laptop.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#74

Post by nunez »

xnx wrote: post #7

The 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.

Agreed. That was the next big boost! I installed my first SSD in this HP workstation-grade laptop that we got "for free" from college. It was like getting a brand new computer! In fact, I ended up giving that computer to my sister who ran it into the ground.

I didn't feel any huge speed boosts like that until the M1 MacBook in 2020.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#75

Post by myself248 »

steve1977 wrote: post #69
dlcarrier wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

> in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.

Tell that to ScreamTracker!

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#76

Post by myself248 »

oso2k wrote: post #71
rr808 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a temporary dumb hack.

I had the same inclination back in the 90s when I upgraded my Cyrix 486 SLC2 50MHz without a heat sink (which seems like a no-no in retrospect) to Cyrix MediaGX 133MHz. The stocker fan was immediately noticeable. I thought I had done something wrong.

Upgrading and Repairing PCs 4th edition even says directly, that some shady resellers will put a heatsink on a chip that they're running beyond spec, but that Intel designs all their processors to run at rated speed without one.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#77

Post by nurettin »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #50
nurettin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single core speed is absolutely a thing that is needed and preferred to multicore. That's why we have avx, amx, etc.

Meh, avx is also just parallelism. That won't get you around Amdahl's law.

Not sure what you mean. It lets you do 64 operations with one instruction. Where's the diminishing returns?

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#78

Post by myself248 »

nikanj wrote: post #68

The craziest thing is, I don't actually know how many gigahertz either my PC or my macbook are. The megahertz race used to fierce!

It's essentially random at any given moment. If I peek, mine will say it's running anywhere between 700MHz and 3.4GHz. Sometimes I think it goes even faster, but only if it's weirdly cold at the time.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#79

Post by pdpi »

xnx wrote: post #7

The 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.

I think the single biggest jump I ever experienced was my first dedicated GPU — a GeForce 2 MX if I'm not mistaken.

Re: PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon

#80

Post by ahartmetz »

hedora wrote: post #25

The Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it. They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing, but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less than half the $990 tray price from the article. I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around ins…

The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X.

That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.

Post reply on HN