sombragris8 hours ago
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 purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.
Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.
This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.
homebrewer7 hours ago
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...
zozbot2347 hours ago
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.
lossyalgo2 hours ago
Also any miner worth their salt knows to undervolt to save power (=money), run cooler, last longer, and run at very close to full speed or even in some cases 100% full-speed, depending on silicon "lottery".
nazgulsenpai3 hours ago
I bought a XFX RX 580 that was used for cryptomining from eBay, used it for 3 years then handed it down to my son who used it for 2 more. It still worked when he removed it. Can confirm.
sombragris7 hours ago
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.
toast04 hours ago
> Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs,
Don't look at the branding. Look at the core type, count, and speed (maybe).
It's been a while since I shopped Intel, but they used to typically release a low core count/lower clock speed Pentium/Celeron on the mainstream cores, often with no hyperthreading. These were typically low cost and could be a good value, you'd get decent single core performance because it's the newest architecture and multicore performance would be iffy but you can't have everything.
> N-class CPUs
These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time. Usually twice the cores, but much less performance per clock. Never feels fast for interactive work. But they make sense for some situations. Some of these get an n3 branding to trick people looking for i3s.
drnick14 hours ago
> These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time.
They may not be ideal for desktops, but they are great low power home server CPUs. In fact, they are much better than ARM alternatives like Raspberry Pis for the money.
toast03 hours ago
Yeah, I consider home server to be non-interactive. If it's got your connectivity needs (and won't self-destruct), n/atom is a good fit.
anthk5 hours ago
A NUC would be enough for a 90% of cases and much cheaper on the long run.
zozbot2344 hours ago
NUCs are high-end miniPCs, there are much lower-end ones including on the second-hand market that are okay for baseline uses.
tirant3 hours ago
I indeed remember too the family of K6 chips and their Super Socket 7 motherboards. They were cheap and affordable, and allowed cpu upgrades to classical Socket 7 motherboards.
The peak of the Super Socket 7 performance CPUs was reached when AMD released the + versions of those chips, the K6-2+ and K6-3+. Those were initially designed for laptops with lower powerconsumption and some enhanced instruction set. But they quickly became common in typical overclockers setup.
I got myself a K6-3+ that I was able to overclock to around 600MHz, probably on an ASUS motherboard.
Back then AMD was fighting so much to get marketshare that you could order for free all types of merchandising from AMD like posters, stickers and CPU badges, and they would even ship it for free from US to Europe. I remember always bringing some to hacker meetings.
accrual43 minutes ago
I happen to have one of those 600MHz chips on my bench currently! It's a K6-2+ that has had the remaining 128KB cache unlocked, making it a K6-3+. It is indeed a speedy chip, performing somewhere above a Pentium II-450 according to Speedsys.
Do you recall how long you used the platform or your next upgrade choice? :)
snarfy2 hours ago
I recall these being referred to as KMD
geocrasher3 hours ago
My first PC was a 286/12 with an AMD chip in it.
I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario.
In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant.
Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn't until the Phenom II BE950, a dual core that I unlocked to quad core , that I felt I had a CPU that matched the K6/2-450 in value. Since then I've had a couple of Ryzen's for my daily driver/work machine, and couldn't be happier. AMD has done a fantastic job keeping price and performance in tune. But, it goes even further if you shop smartly.
Overall, this was an excellent read, and brought back a lot of memories. The 6x86 for example- too much promise for what they actually delivered. And, thanks to this article I now know why so many cheap motherboards had their CPU's soldered. It wasn't a technology decision, but a legal one. I had no idea of that at the time.
tracker1an hour ago
I had an AMD 5x86 @133 that lasted me several years... I had the secondary cache module and 64mb of ram, which was a lot for the time. It wasn't great for gaming, but general productivity software and just simple web browsing it was kind of a beast from the ram/cache performance. The next computer I really remember was an OC'd AMD Duron at 1ghz.
nazgulsenpai3 hours ago
I bought an AMD Sempron "single core" CPU for a pittance (can't remember now how much it was, but it was the cheapest new CPU available) and as able to unlock the second core in the BIOS immediately with no issues, saving a ton of money. Those were the days.
absolute86063 hours ago
Oh man, my first custom build had a Phenom II 955 BE. Overclocked beautifully, I loved that system. Got it in a barebones kit from good old TigerDirect, RIP
aaroninsf2 hours ago
Fellow AMD fan here—it wasn't that long ago that I finally relinquished the old ABIT motherboard that overclocked my AMD badboy to eke out extra cycles for my DAW.
Also, for Half Life.
theodorethomas6 hours ago
I 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.
specproc12 hours ago
I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.
coldpie5 hours ago
1974: Intel 8080
1978: Intel 8086
1982: Intel 80286
1985: Intel 80386
1990: Intel 8010386
1995: Intel 801040386
2005: Intel 80107045386
2025: Intel 8.010207659386e12pavlov8 hours ago
The Pentium III does sound like a good chip choice for a retro cyberpunk story. Like they said in “The Matrix”, 1999 was the peak of human civilization.
(586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)
twoodfin2 hours ago
The cartridge-style packaging of the Pentium II/III’s was also peak for the lineup.
My favorite PC I ever built was a dual-CPU Tyan motherboard that eventually held two screaming fast Coppermines. Needed a university copy of Windows 2000 to really make them sing—the Windows 95 series never supported SMP—and it was glorious.
electrosphere3 hours ago
I remember 1999/2000-ish I had both a Pentium III/Intel motherboard and Athlon PC. The Pentium III system was rock solid, and performed fantasic. Even the CPU and motherboard looked amazing.
The Athlon was solid but less reliable, various reboots and glitches. I kind have always had a preference for Intel since then.
thatjoeoverthr8 hours ago
IIRC III was also 6th gen microarchitecture. Pentium IV was the 7th.
mtzaldo2 hours ago
You can watch Serial Experiments Lain. It is an anime from 1998.
bitwize3 hours ago
P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
geocrasher3 hours ago
I recall as a teen wondering if the 486 was so good, how amazing a 1086 was going to be someday :D
vikingerik6 hours ago
Not just you: the Tom Swift novels reboot in the 1990s had Tom once bragging about "the latest seven-eighty-six processor."
mrlonglong12 minutes ago
I loved the 486DX/4 at 120MHz. That thing was fast.
xbar4 hours ago
Nice nostalgic piece. I have a lot of fond "favorite chip" memories from that era.
Not to be too pedantic, I would contend that at the time, it was pretty clear to enthusiast what the differences were. Everyone in the industry was paying attention to 486s and the cost of a genuine intel chip. The FDIV bug was on every Evening News for weeks. AMD and Cyrix vs intel debates were common.
I agree that it is not obvious now that Pentium came after 486, but at the time, it was clear.
stevefan19992 days ago
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.
gabrielsroka2 days ago
Trademarks
> The name invoked the number five, but was completely trademarkable, unlike the number 586.
dspillett8 hours ago
Yes, and Intel had actually lost a legal attempt to stop people using the numbers (I can't remember if this was earlier in the 486 era or if it was something they tried first with 586).
But marketing was a large part of the reason that they started caring so much at that particular time. The Pentium line was the first time Intel had marketed directly to the end users¹² in part as a response to alt-486 manufacturers (AMD, Cyryx) doing the same with their products⁴ like clock-doubled units compatible with standard 486/487 targetted sockets (which were cheaper and, depending on workload, faster than the Intel upgrade options).
--------
[1] this was the era that “Intel Inside (di dum di dum)” initially came from
[2] that was also why the FDIV bug was such a big thing despite processor bugs³ being, within the industry, an accepted part of the complex design and manufacturing process
[3] for a few earlier examples: a 486 FPU bug that resulted in what should have been errors (such as overflow) being silently ignored, another (more serious) one in trig functions that resulted in a partial recall and the rest of that line being marked down as 486SX units (with a pin removed to effectively disable the FPU), similarly an entire stepping of 386 chips ended up sold as “for 16 bit code only”, going further back into the 8-bit days some versions of the 6502 had a bug or two in handling things (jump instructions, loading via relative references) that straddled page boundaries (which were mitigated in code by being careful with code/data alignment, no recalls, just errata published)
jhbadger8 hours ago
I remember when IBM was upset that various companies were calling their 80286 computers "<Brandname> AT" like the IBM AT ("advanced technology"). But you can't trademark a preposition!
kube-system2 hours ago
It's not that simple -- you can definitely trademark a preposition. Go search USPTO, it's not hard to find some: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90234636
laurencerowe12 hours ago
i686 was the microarchitecture introduced with the Pentium Pro and then Pentium II.
chasil11 hours ago
If I am correct, the Pentium Pro was the first "out of order" design. It specialized in 32-bit code, and did not handle 16-bit code very well.
The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance.
AMD actually made successful CPUs based on Berkeley RISC, similar to SPARC (they used register windows). The AMD K5 had this RISC CPU at its core. AMD bought NexGen and improved their RISC design for the K6 then Athlon.
twoodfin9 hours ago
Because of the branding change, history will remember the Pentium (P5). It was really the Pentium Pro (P6) that put Intel leaps ahead on x86 microarchitecture, a lead they’d hold with only a few minor stumbles for two decades.
Bob Colwell (mentioned elsewhere ITT) wrote a fascinating technical history of the P6: The Pentium Chronicles.
consp9 hours ago
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).
twoodfin9 hours ago
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.
rasz6 hours ago
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.
squater10 hours ago
Small correction, Pentium Pro was the first OoO microprocessor from Intel. Others like IBM POWER1 came earlier
p_l9 hours ago
It was intel's (at least) second OoO processor, after i960 - from which it pulled important team members.
gpderetta4 hours ago
Was i960 OoO?
jabl8 hours ago
OoO is a surprisingly old idea, first used in the IBM System/360 Model 91 released all the way back in 1966.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasulo's_algorithm
Took a while until transistor budgets allowed it to be implemented in consumer microprocessors.
twoodfin2 hours ago
Also for the gap between CPU speed and memory speed to matter enough for it to be worthwhile.
chasil10 hours ago
Very true, Bob Colwell was hired with past experience in this, I think from "Cyndrome" (edit: Multiflow).
dspillett8 hours ago
> The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance.
It wasn't a full pipeline, but large parts of the integer ALU and related circuitry were duplicated so that complex (time-consuming) instructions like multiply could directly follow each other without causing a pipeline bubble. Things were still essentially executed entirely in-order but the second MUL (or similar) could start before the first was complete, if it didn't depend upon the result of the first, and the Pentium line had a deeper pipeline than previous Intel chips to take most advantage of this.
The compiler optimisations, and similar manual code changes with the compiler wasn't bright enough, were to reduce the occurrence of instructions depending on the results of the instructions before, which would make the pipeline bubble come back as the subsequent instructions couldn't be started until the current one was complete. This was also a time when branch prediction became a major concern, and further compiler optimisations (and manual coding tricks) were used to help here too, because aborting a deep pipeline because of a branch (or just stalling the pipeline at the conditional branch point until the decision is made) causes quite a performance cost.
NetMageSCW5 hours ago
That reminds of using the pencil method on an Athlon to overclock.
zem11 hours ago
I always figured the "-ium" part was in imitation of element naming, to make it sound scientific
rob7411 hours ago
Por qué no los dos? If "-ium" makes nerds think of an element name, and others of a premium product, all the better. I'd bet both of these interpretations were listed in the original internal marketing presentation of the name...
stevefan19997 hours ago
Self-correction: Pentium MMX is still i586, it is Pentium Pro that is i686, the confusion is real.
hulitu2 days ago
> but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium
some say that they tried to add 486 with 100 and the result had some numbers after the comma, that's why they named it pentium (yes, i know about the FDIV bug)
wodenokoto7 hours ago
Something something Intel tried to add 100 to 486, got 585.97858475858473737272747837 and just called it pentium
dice6 hours ago
0xf00fc7c8
moefhan hour ago
Shouldn't that be 0xc8c70ff0, since we're talking about a little-endian CPU? (according to this[1] the bytes in memory are F0 0F C7 C8).
On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have recognized the F00F bug mention if you had actually written 0xc8c70ff0.
montroser8 hours ago
I remember those Cyrix chips well. We had a little shop where we would assemble boxes to spec. And hey, a 486 is a 486, we reasoned. They were cheap, ran cool, and just about as fast as the others.
daniel_iversen8 hours ago
Me too, and I recall the Cyrix "Pentium-like" chips were cheaper and faster than Intel's actual Pentium chips! [1]
MattGrommesan hour ago
I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for my cheap Cyrix CPU. Once I was near finishing an important project in the middle of the night and my CPU fan died. The cyrix chip would overheat in no time and shut down so I ended up filling a coffee mug with ice and jamming it up against the chip, giving me more precious minutes before it got hot enough to shut down again. I would swap out the ice in the mug and give it another go. I got that project done. :)
rob7411 hours ago
Another 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 way. The Itanium CPUs with the new architecture were quickly rechristened "Itanic" and Intel grudgingly had to switch to AMDs instruction set - that's the reason why the current instruction set still used by all "x86" CPUs is often referred to as AMD-64.
phire10 hours ago
What I find interesting is that Intel engineers actually designed their own 64-bit extension, somewhere along the same lines as AMD64.
Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality.
Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst shipped.
If it wasn't for AMD beating them to market with AMD64, Intel would have probably eventually allowed their engineers to enable the 64-bit extension. And when it did come time to add AMD64 support to the Pentium 4 (later Prescott and Cedar Mill models) the existing 64-bit support probably made for a good starting point.
Bob Colwell talks about this (and some of the x86 team vs Itanium team drama) in his quora answer and followup comments: https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...
p_l9 hours ago
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
twoodfin9 hours ago
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 biggest leaps.
AdamN8 hours ago
They were trying to compete with Sun and IBM in the server space (SPARC and Power) and thought that they needed a totally pro architecture (which Itanium was). The baggage of 32-bit x86 would have just slowed it all down. However having an x86-64 would have confused customers in the middle.
Think back then it was all about massive databases - that was where the big money was and x86 wasn't really setup for the top end load patterns of databases (or OLAP data lakes).
NetMageSCW5 hours ago
Steve Jobs quote seems appropriate and yet still hard for companies to learn: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will"
twoodfin2 hours ago
In the end, Intel did cannibalize themselves. It wasn’t too long after the Itanium launch that Intel was publicly presenting a roadmap that had Xeons as the appealing mass-market server product.
phire7 hours ago
> 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.
twoodfin2 hours ago
I wonder what their engineers thought.
rob748 hours ago
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.
SonOfKyuss7 hours ago
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.
rob745 hours ago
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...
mrweasel9 hours ago
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.
einr6 hours ago
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.
thisisidiotica day ago
Yea I'll take "Things that make me feel old for $1000 Alex."
AdamN8 hours ago
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.
SoftTalker2 hours ago
First hard drive I bought for a PC was 20MB. I remember thinking how I would never fill it.
xoxxala6 hours ago
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.
[deleted]21 hours agocollapsed
1970-01-015 hours ago
That'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.
Anonasty11 hours ago
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.
[deleted]11 hours agocollapsed
rasz11 hours ago
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
June 2007 $40 Celeron 420 overclockable out of the box from stock 1.6 to 3.2GHz beat best $1000 CPUs of year 2005 (FX-57, P4 EE).
Same goes for Graphic chips starting around 1998/9.
tracker1an hour ago
Better, throwing in two of those Celeron 300As into a modded dual socket MB... I remember running one of those OC'd Duron's at 1.1ghz... had a custom shim to better support the cpu cooler with it. IIRC, I ran it with a Voodoo 3 card and maxed out ram. Had 2x IBM Deathstar drives in Raid-0... that was the big mistake, crazy fast, but first drive died, and then the second before I could get an RMA on the first. Only the 3tb Seagate line was worse.
dspillett8 hours ago
> 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.
consp9 hours ago
Fun thing is with a tiny bit of manipulation you can run a P3 tualatin at 1.33ghz via a slot adapter and some pin disablement and some voltage mods (or if you had the right adapter a jumper) in a motherboard which came with a low tier P2 or even earlier. So without replacing your Asus P2B from very early 1998 well up to mid 00s with astonishing performance gains, that motherboard had a massive lifespan in the right hands. Mine is still running with a new voltage regulator to this day.
jl610 hours ago
It's so much fun living through the steep bit of an S curve that we imagine it might last forever...
canpan9 hours ago
I get the feeling. The 90s in particular, maybe even until crysis went super fast. Then tech felt incredibly stagnant for over a decade.
But the time since 2020 feels much faster again. It's scary! But it's exciting.
Ekaros9 hours ago
On other hand not being hopelessly outdated in a relatively short time does have perks. It is cheaper to not have to update constantly and still getting decent performance.
mememememememo9 hours ago
Apple M chips?
irishcoffee6 hours ago
I assumed the comment was about LLMs...
bluedino5 hours ago
The 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.
badc0ffee2 hours ago
The 486DLC was fully 32 bit. The 286/386SX-like model with a 16 bit bus was the 486SLC.
But, even a 486SLC wasn't all that bad at the time. It was still much faster than a 386DX for many things (DOOM, for example).
These AT-like machines limited users to 16-bit ISA cards for expansion, and a 24-bit address bus (16 MB RAM). But how many consumer PCs used more than that, back when your 32-bit bus options were VLB (video only), MCA (IBM only), or EISA (expensive servers/workstations only).
EvanAnderson3 hours ago
Second only to getting an SSD in my 2006-vintage laptop the AMD 5x86 was the best upgrade I ever put in a computer, dollars for performance. It made my 486SX-25 run like a 75Mhz+ Pentium. Linux kernel builds flew after that. I also fondly remember seeing little bits of "Second Reality" run better or show me things I'd never seen before (more of the sword extending further from the pool, as an example).
ricardo819 hours ago
Ah. There's a whole generation of people who never enjoyed the Intel inside / Pentium jingle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU
patwolf8 hours ago
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.
giantrobot2 hours ago
I have a bunny suit plushie on my shelf to this day. The other Pentium marketing blitz I remember was in the 1998 Lost in Space which had a TV ad for a Pentium XXI or something. Also notable was the Silicon Graphics branding in that movie. Which I have always found amusing since SGI didn't have any consumer products and even for businesses the prices were "Call Us" which has always meant eye watering expensive.
mememememememo9 hours ago
"enjoyed"
It was annoying as it seemed every computer ad needed to play it, not just intel ads.
sgerenser8 hours ago
They didn’t need to, it by playing it and slapping Intel Insude stickers on the computer, they got a substantial marketing fee/kickback per unit sold.
sehugg11 hours ago
I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.
easygenes4 hours ago
I never felt during this era that the information about these chips was hard to come by as the author claims. Retrospectively I appreciate that’s because I grew up living by a large, well funded library in a tech centric town, so they always had all the latest tech publications.
nobleach7 hours ago
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.
dspillett7 hours ago
> 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.
nobleach7 hours ago
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.
kej3 hours ago
I really like that VIA produced a CPU with integrated graphics, prominently labeled "VIA GRA", the same year that the FDA approved sildenafil.
irusensei9 hours ago
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.
gpderetta9 hours ago
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.
irusensei6 hours ago
I stand corrected thanks.
bluedino5 hours ago
> 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.
tycoon6664 hours ago
The AMD 5x86 was the first Machine i ran Linux on
textwizhub3 hours ago
I still keep and metal case of my first 486 with 66Mhz CPU with Windows 3.11 installed and remember that Pentium 100Mhz was what people were buying next.
bentt9 hours ago
Cool writeup. I never knew they moved to the name Pentium over 586 simply for trademark ability.
rickcarlino8 hours ago
I am almost 40 and only now realizing “pent”ium came after “4”86.
bdcravens6 hours ago
I'm also 50 and just realized it.
chinathrow7 hours ago
Booting up a Pentium after having used a 486 for years was like driving on the high way compared to riding a toddler bike on a foot trail.
icedchai6 hours ago
This makes me feel old. I remember getting a 486 (DX4/100) in mid-1994, the Pentium was still too expensive!
bluedino5 hours ago
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.
karim793 hours ago
Oof I'm old enough to remember the Cyrix chips. They were cheaper than the other players, which lured in a lot of people who then regretted it once they realised that they were constantly crashing hot-garbage. Good times.
Zardoz848 hours ago
They add 100 to the 486, but they got 585.99999999.... so they called it Pentium xD
jimt12344 hours ago
Here's the answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos
guenthert10 hours ago
Well pentiums of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_About_the_Pentiums