I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.
Not just you: the Tom Swift novels reboot in the 1990s had Tom once bragging about "the latest seven-eighty-six processor."
What came after the 486?
71–80 of 158 posts
Re: What came after the 486?
#72I remember a 120MHz Pentium Linux box arriving at a cottage in Crete, where, with the aid of a 56k USRobotics modem, we (my wife and I) worked remotely in 1995-6. She had a Mac SE/30 for her tourist guidebook work. She later upgraded to a 6100 PowerMac "pizza-box", various iMacs, G3/G4/G5, whereas I saved a quad-200MHz PentiumPro monster (Compaq Professional Workstation 8000, tricked up to 3GB RAM) from the skip. I regret taking that to the recycling centre many years later.
Re: What came after the 486?
#73Something something Intel tried to add 100 to 486, got 585.97858475858473737272747837 and just called it pentium
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Re: What came after the 486?
#74Re: What came after the 486?
#75Another interesting episode "after the 486" was the switch from 32 bit to 64 bit, where Intel wanted to bury the ghost of the 8086 once and for all and switched to a completely new architecture ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64 ), while AMD opted to extend the x86 architecture ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 ). This was probably the first time that customers voted with their feet against Intel in a major w…
If this is true or not I don't know, but I worked on a project with an HP employee and we were talking about the Itanium. At some point the HP guy goes "You know we more or less designed that thing, right?" I would tend to believe that the Itanium is an HP product, given that they've always seems more invested in the platform than Intel.
Yes, it was originally designed as a successor to HP PA-RISC and then brought to Intel. I don't know how much it changed from the original design during development at Intel.
Re: What came after the 486?
#76> The original Pentium-branded CPU topped out at 200 MHz in the end, and the Pentium MMX-branded CPU reached 233 MHz.
There was a mobile 266MHz Pentium MMX, Tillamook
And it appears there was a 300MHz version according to Wikipedia.
Re: What came after the 486?
#77This makes me feel old. I remember getting a 486 (DX4/100) in mid-1994, the Pentium was still too expensive!
A friend of mine bought a Pentium 60MHz from a local computer store, they originally wanted $10,000 for it, but he got it for $4,000.
It wasn't much more than a year later that I was able to get a Pentium 100MHz for $2000. It's amazing how fast things progressed back then.
Re: What came after the 486?
#78The worst part about the 486 name was all the varieties, an uninformed consumer could get a real lemon.
The author links to an example:
https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-486slc2-cpu-when-a-clone-isnt-a...
You then had the 486 DLCs which were even worse. you'd get companies that sold 386 and even 286 systems with '486' chips, constrained by slow, 16-bit buses, etc.
Re: What came after the 486?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, it turns out that it could scale up, it just needed more power than other architectures. As long as it was only servers and desktop PCs, you only noticed it in more elaborate cooling and maybe on your power bill, and even with laptops, x86 compatibility was more important than the higher power usage for a long time. It's just when high-performance CPUs started to be put in devices with really limited power budgets that x86 started looking really bad...
Re: What came after the 486?
#80That's quite a lot of words to say "Pentium"
Sure AMD and a few others had back-seat answers, but Intel was literally driving the bus.