Once upon a time I used to spend time and effort reading rumors on usenet (back when it was useful) about new! improved! faster! sexier! processors. 200mhz! Oh, I remember that one well. I couldn't afford the Intel wonder but I did get the Cyrix (anyone remember them?) for $400 about a week after it first came hot-fresh and new off the assembly lines. At the time, that was a lot of money for me -- so it was definitely a sacrifice. I was at the top of technology -- following the news, getting the newest and greatest and processing the hell out of my computer.
I remember the 300, the 600.. who can forget the 1ghz? That was something. Somewhere along the way things changed.. I'm stuck in a time warp. My desktop is a dual 600mhz Intel (and I got those for free, they used to run the original dslreports website).. and well, it's good enough. My laptop is a mere 1.25ghz (g4, mind you) and it's just fine and dandy. My work desktop is somewhere in the 2ghz range (I don't even know where) and that's fine and dandy too.. sure, it builds our code fast... that's nice, I suppose.
I just don't care anymore. Somewhere somehow I saw a reference to a 3ghz cpu. First reaction was "when did that happen?".. second was.. "oh I don't care anyway". In a way that's a bit liberating -- I no longer have to spend far too much money to stay on top of things (I just don't care anymore) -- but it's also a bit sad. Somewhere along the way the whole speed race lost its magic.
Here's to the 5ghz cpu, early, bet I won't notice it on time anyway.
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Cyrix, there is a company I haven't heard mentioned in a long time. Once upon a time I worked in an IS department for a company that made CPUs for Cyrix. In many ways those were the good old (but seemingly primitive) days.
#I found it used to be interesting to watch because there were huge architectural changes in the chips giving them new speed, ie better pipelines, fewer cycles/instruction, and moving stuff onto the main chip. Now it just seems they're shrinking the dies and cranking them at faster clock rates to get more speed, hardly worth watching unless chip fabrication is your hobby.
Sean
#I almost bought the Cyrix clone of the 486. Those were *hot* stuff at the time, better than the real thing. (Then Intel drowned out everyone by a number of tricks that made cloning the Pentium a difficult prospect.)
In day-to-day tasks, CPUs have always spent most of their time idling; with a clock speed around 1GHz, they're also fast enough to handle the occasional burst of activity with ease. At that point, there really ain't any appreciable difference, particularly in a multitasking OS that doesn't force you to wait idly for any particular task to complete.
Nowadays, the real speed race has moved over. CPUs are not the hotbed anymore. GPUs are where it's at if you want the thrill of the chase. Naturally, that doesn't much affect those of who us who're not hardcore gamers or are doing 3D graphics for a living.
#I used to have a P150! Here's a pict:
http://openlab.jp/kitaro/natsupaso/_CPU/CYRIX/CYRIX_6X86.jpg
I can't belive that was back in day. heck does anyone remember the RISC based NexGen (IBM spinoff i think)..they where hot! back in the day when Computer Shopper was a bible of parts:
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Nx586/L_NexGen-Nx586-P80.jpg
take care,
cellx
As soon as you can buy a bright high-end anything, automatically they start to talk about the near future ultra bright, even high-end thingy at same price or slighty less than you have paid for your not-so-rock-bottom-still -packaged new thing. It happens with digicams, CPUS, whole workstations, pdas, cell phones or anything else involved in this world. Ultimate geek's life its so hard.
BTW I still manage with my powerbook G3 266, a dual G4/450 workstation and the PC, PII-266 ( Yes,I do my work a farm of obsolete computing platforms). Surely I will enjoy any of the brand new powerbooks or G5, but I prefer to spend the bucks in other things and having a nice retro-computing studio. :-P
#That's really awesome, honestly. The fastest thing in my house is 1.2GHz, and that belongs to my roommate.
My webserver is running on a -33 MHz 486sx- .. (and i bet no one here can bring it down just on their own either ;)) a Tandy Sensation, actually... maxed out to it's 40MB RAM limit, and a 2GB hard drive, partitioned into 4 500MB partitions... and it also does email services and DNS for my domain.
My personal machine is a P3/600 with 128MB ram and 12GB hard disk, and the file server on the network is a K6-2/400MHz, with 384MB ram, and 80GB hard drive..
I have to go to my neighbor's house to play DOOM 3, but that's alright by me.
I remember getting a cyrix 166+. It was actually a 133 mhz processor, but they claimed it to be rival in processing power to the pentium 166. Years later I got a 300mhz chip, and built my girl's mom a computer using the 166+. Three years after that, she gave the now-antique computer back to me, and it went on a shelf where it hasn't left since.
I didn't like her mom. Hence the computer earned the name "Orpheus", for surviving a trip to hell and back.
I still think $400 is a lot of money to spend on a CPU!
# Back when I was your age we didn't have fancy shmancy "internets"! We had 2400 baud modems and BBS's.... AND WE LIKED IT!! Good ol' ANSI login screens getting hacked every other week, those were the days....
Why when i was about 8 years old, i still remember playing some Zork-like game on my friend's-dad's home dumb-terminal that had ta have the phone stretched outta the kitchen, onto the dining room table and plunked into the 300 baud modem/phone/thingamabob to connect to his office mainframe!
Back in the 90s when I spent near $2000 on a new computer (IBM 486sx33!!), couple of my friends asked "What the heck do you want a computer for?" HAH, who's laughing now kiddo?!?!
*cough cough*ahem... think some of my geeky roleplaying-type stupidity burst outta me there for a minute... my bad.
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