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Hardware

65 CPUs From 100 MHz to 3066 MHz 359

Posted by Hemos from the marathon-benchtest dept.
socram writes " Tom's Hardware posted an interesting article, describing and benchmarking 65 kinds of CPUs from 1994 to 2003. Opinions on what constitutes "adequate computing speed" vary greatly from one user to the next. While one person may be perfectly content with an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode", there is another group at the other end of the scale - video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes."
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65 CPUs From 100 MHz to 3066 MHz More

65 CPUs From 100 MHz to 3066 MHz

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  • going through your own stash... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:27AM (#5324866)
    Going through your own stash of parts and Misc. stuff, how many of these processors can you dig up?

    I've managed to dig up an 8086, 286, 386, 2x 486 66's, 2 486 DX4 100's, P75, P100, 2x P133, Celeron 333, Celeron 400, PIII 450, and an Athalon 1800+....

    it's a small list, but shows a good history of computing power in itself.

    Zro
    Genius to some, Madman to most.
    • Before I bought my Archos MP3 player, I built a computer using old components that played MP3s in my car.... it was a Pent 133 and it was perfect for the job.
    • An Amiga 500, a P2-400 Slot 1, an AMD Athlon 550 Slot A, a P3-933 and a celeron 1100 in my laptop. The p3-933 is my current workstation and is fast enough, typing code is not going to be faster on a 3GHz box, but games lack a bit. The p2-400 and Athlon are testboxes and are mostly switched off, but still do what they must do. :)

      What I found suprising in the article was that an 166MMX with a radeon 9700pro can still run Q3A at a reasonable speed on a reasonable resolution. A new PC is not a right investment, a new videocard might be.
    • OK, from memory:

      8080
      8085
      8086
      8088
      80188
      80186
      80286
      i860
      i890
      80386 (sx/dx)
      80486 (sx/dx/dx2/dx4) Nx586
      6x86
      Pent (60/90/100/133)
      Pent Pro
      K6
      K62
      PIII Xeon
      Athlon (slot A/socket A)

      And those are just the intel chips :)

      BTW, anyone have a i432 they want to get rid of?

    • Hey, if you have old PC hardware like this, you might consider contributing to the FreeDOS Project [freedos.org]. Part of our goal is to support older hardware like this. Even though you don't find a lot of 286's in people's homes anymore (at least, not turned on) you still find a fair number of 286's in embedded systems.

      Please consider testing FreeDOS on your older hardware. You'd be helping out our little project.

      Thanks.

      -jh

  • Adequate speed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Harald74 ( 40901 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:27AM (#5324869) Homepage Journal
    While one person may be perfectly content with an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode",


    Use the correct tool for the job; if a pen and notebook or binder will do, use it. No need to use hours and hours to set up a membership database if your club comprises 20 members and have a meeting every first Thursday of the month...
    • The point is that an old computer that may seem like it truly suckes the big one can be very useful. Granda Johns and Old man Willson do not need anything more than Windows 3.1, 95 or a well set up Linux box.

      I remember the old days when a 486 DX2 was not a bad gaming machine...
      • Granda Johns and Old man Willson do not need anything more than Windows 3.1, 95 or a well set up Linux box.

        Aren't "Granda Jones" and "Old man Willson" the characters in that obscene and heavily repeated troll post?

      • Re:Adequate speed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by rabiteman ( 585341 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @10:29AM (#5326064) Homepage
        I remember the old days when a 486 DX2 was not a bad gaming machine...

        Those days aren't necessarily over yet! My current Athlon XP 1800+ runs Doom 2 slower than my old 486 did. Thanks to Windows XP's horrendous DOS performance, Doom 2 stutters as badly as it did on my poor Cyrix 386 DX/40 (I think) upgrade chip. After which I moved up to a silky smooth AMD 486 DX4/100.

        Wow, I just realized that my last 4 CPUs have been AMD:
        486 DX4/100
        K6 166
        K6-2/350
        Athlon XP 1800+ Maybe I should buy an old Duron 1GHz to fill in that little gap I left? :

        • Re:Adequate speed (Score:3, Insightful)

          by delus10n0 ( 524126 )
          If Doom2 isn't running properly on WinXP, you're doing something wrong. You might want to try one of the Doom(2) "emulators" out there that are native to Windows2k/XP (and that use current 3d and sound hardware,) like Doom Legacy [newdoom.com]. As a side note, if you ever need to run a DOS app under Windows with proper sound support, check out VDMSound [sourceforge.net].
    • Use the correct tool for the job.

      Caveat: Be sure you know what the job is.

      If you just want to keep track of you members, then pen and paper fits the bill nicely. However, if you want to keep track of your members *and* have a warm, fuzzy geek experience while doing so, then go for a nice laptop.

      Most people don't *need* a top of the range graphics card any more than they *need* to play top of the range games. That doesn't make getting one a Bad Thing though.
    • I wonder how Windows XP runs on a 100MHz CPU, if you have enough memory. Would using Word be a pain? Could you use it in a small home office?

      Yes, and I did RTFA, but they had a bunch of bar graphs there, they didn't say anything about the feel of the machine.
    • Whoever made the Pentium 133 comment is being silly. Such a machine is more than adequate to run a current Linux distribution and a good range of applications (Emacs, TeX, web browsing with Netscape 4 or Dillo, KDE or GNOME if it has enough RAM, even development work in C or scripting languages).

  • old theory (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobertTaylor ( 444958 ) <roberttaylor1234.gmail@com> on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:28AM (#5324872) Homepage Journal
    video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes.

    There is an old theory to do with penis size...

    For the record, I am running a 286 ;)
    • > There is an old theory to do with penis size...

      Try this script (stolen from someones Usenet signature):
      penislength.sh:

      echo `uptime|grep days|sed 's/.*up \([0-9]*\) day.*/\1\/10+/'; \
      cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz|awk '{print $4"/30 +";}'; free|grep '^Mem' \
      |awk '{print $3"/1024/3+"}'; df -P -k -x nfs | grep -v 1k \
      | awk '{if ($1 ~ "/dev/(scsi|sd)"){ s+= $2} s+= $2;} END \
      {print s/1024/50"/15+70";}'`|bc|sed 's/\(.$\)/.\1cm/'
      The constants in the script are probably in need of revision, since running it on my puny 350 MHz Linux box (SCSI and over 450 days uptime) rates me at a respectable 22 cm, but I'm not complaining :-). (Note: if you have one of those 3+ GHz screamers, I don't want to know the results, ok?)

      Conversion to imperial units is left as an exercise to the reader.

  • moral of the story? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RMH101 ( 636144 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:28AM (#5324878)
    I think we've finally seen over the last year or so the point where the OSs and apps *can't* get any more bloaty: and so sales have plateaued. You don't need anything more than, say, a 600mhz machine for Office, internet, email and just about anything a home user might want to do apart from 3d gaming (and you've got a ps2 or xbox for that, right?). This is a Good Thing.

    • Re:moral of the story? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sheriff Fatman ( 602092 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:50AM (#5324958) Homepage

      Granted. I don't see how any word processor can justifiably require a 1.6Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM. In fact, I think Office 97 on a Pentium Pro 200 was perfectly usable in it's day and is just as usable now, but that's not the whole story. There's a whole plethora of applications which are now commonplace, which weren't even considered feasible ten (?) years ago. I can remember a piece of DOS software on my old 286 which displayed JPEG images. That was it. It took noticeable time just to decode the file, and then sample it down to 320x200 to display on a normal VGA monitor. Nowadays, we don't even consider the decoding process when viewing JPGs.

      There's other similar applications - DivX movies, strong encryption, even MP3 audio - which we now take for granted 'cos we've got so much horsepower to play with that processing overhead is no longer an issue. Now we're getting into the realm of PVRs, digital camcorders, encoding real-time video straight into DivX - applications which appeal to ordinary home users, and which require some *serious* megahertz. The games industry provides a convenient milestone - anyone can tell that Quake III looks better than the original Wolfenstein 3D, but more importantly, they can see that they're fundamentally the same thing. It's a lot harder to compare modern video editing software with that of ten years ago, because ten years ago the only people editing movies on their home PCs were masochistic millionaires.

      Rather than focusing on all those wasted MHz driving more and more bloated word-processors, consider some of the things we just *couldn't* do with slower hardware, and wonder what we're going to be taking for granted ten years from now. :)

      • I always really like the MP3 example since I really noticed the difference. I remember back in the day when I had a 486 33. It was hell to decode MP3s. I couldn't do it in stereo Windows 95, the overhead from the OS was too much. I had to dorp to DOS if I wanted to drop to DOS if I wanted to get full stereo output.

        Now? Hell I can run MP3s in the background when I play games. Running Winamp for hours on end only takes a few seconds of processor time. In under 10 years it has gone from MP3s being something I had to take special steps to play, and do nothing else while I did, to being able to use them for background music no matter what I'm doing.

        Things like HD video are one of the Next Big Things(tm) that are going to need serious horsepower. I am mostly content with my 1.6ghz system as it can do everything I want.... Except decode HD quality videos. The Windows Media 9 demos on Microsoft's site stutter during playback, I just don't have the CPU power to decode them.
    • you insensitive clod!
    • I could see another step forward in processor speed demand coming once they achieve a user-friendly voice interface woven into the OS. It'd be cool to have such a PC in the kitchen, for example, where you could just have a flat panel display and a microphone hanging from a cabinet (wireless keyboard and mouse could be kept nearby in a drawer or something). Voice recognition has come along pretty well in recent years, so it's not out of the question...
    • I don't think it's a more bloaty thing, It hink it is just awhile ago it finally reached the point where thing are fast enough (and then ore than fast enough) for what we want to do. Back in the 486 days, things were NOT fast enough. You could have a top of the line system, and lots of shit still took forever. I remember one of my friends had a 486 50DX (or was it DX2, I don't remember. Top of the line at time time. None the less, it still took like a minute to load Word or Work and even more time to print something complex. It used to be the rule you'd print something complex, and tehn go on a coffee break because your system was out of commission for 15 mintues.

      Well now I can throw together a P3 800 or something and it will load any productivity app really quickly and do almost anything I could want in a minimum amount of time. Now if I print something, even something really ocmplex, the only thing I'm ever wating on is the printer itself.

      Also, plenty of what minimalist zealots call "unnecessary bloat" really isn't. For example even a stripped down version of Linux is "bloated" when compared to DOS. DOS was so simple, you could actually move it almost entirely out of the way if you wanted to. Linux always uses some resources since it always provides basic features like memory management and so on. And then you take modern OSes like Linux with X and something like KDE or Windows XP or soemthing. Require massively more resources than DOS. However it's for a reason. People want the functionality that these things provide. I want a GUI, I want a HAL and HEL, I want multi-tasking and so on. This all takes resources.

      Also some things reduce usage of one type by increaing it in a different way. Compression is a good example. Compressed stuff, espcially lossy compression like MPEG reduces disk usage significantly. However, it is done at a cost of increased processor usage. A 128k MP3 file does an acceptable job of encoding a 16-bit 44.1khz wave file and does so at about a 11:1 compression ratio. However, I can playback PCM data on even a 286. My old 486 33 had trouble decoding a 128k MP3 in realtime.

      OH, and please let's not get on the whole "only consoles should be used for gaming" shit. There are plenty of reasons to want to play gameson a PC.

  • 100 MegaHertz? You were lucky! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Burb ( 620144 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:29AM (#5324882)
    (Cue Monty Python Yorkshiremen Sketch)

    Prediction: This discussion will end up with someone wittering on about punch cards, paper tape, and front panel access to core memory.

    Then someone else will recall the Dilbert cartoon where the engineer boasts "I made a database entirely out of zeros because we had no ones".

    Oh, damn, done it myself.

  • More Gigahertz != more productive (Score:4, Interesting)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:29AM (#5324885) Homepage Journal
    While one person may be perfectly content with an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode"

    Just because I have an old machine doesn't mean I can't make productive use of it. All right, I can't do gaming, but my Pentium 333 machine suffices for everything else. Just make sure you have enough memory to run everything comfortably without swapping. Heck, I'm even running a webserver [cjb.net] on it.

    • The DHCP sever for Indiana University (40,000+ students) use to run on a 486 with linux. I don't know what they use now. Just shows what a box can do if you don't use a GUI.
    • Web serving is probably the least CPU-intensive thing I do with my machines. I've done it on a 486-33. I'm sure you have better examples of making use of your P-333. For instance my fastest workstation is a P2-350 which is fine for watching (most) movies with software decoding.
    • Just because I have an old machine doesn't mean I can't make productive use of it. All right, I can't do gaming, but my Pentium 333 machine suffices for everything else.
      You are probably more productive since you can't do gaming on your box. I know that any game on whatever box I'm working on definitely cuts way into my productivity (as does access to /.).
    • They do equal more capabilities. Go ahead and try realtime audio work on your system. Start with something simple, a peice with 8 stereo tracks and some simple effects, maybe 1 EQ per track and an overall reverb. That will kill your system, never mind if you tried to setup a complecated project.

      Or what about something a little more simple, say MPEG-4 playback? Try and playback broadcast quality MPEG-4 (720x480, 30i couple megabits/second). Not happening on that system. Worse still if you were to try something with HDTV specs.

      Now, if the system works for you, great. By all means, use what works for you and don't spend money on more power if you don't need it. HWOEVER recognise that there are plenty of applicaitons (more every day) aside form games that demand more power than a system like that has. The continual increase power is not a pointless thing.

  • Who read this as... (Score:4, Funny)

    by The_Mutato ( 631710 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:30AM (#5324887)
    "65 CPUs that were overclocked from 100 mhz to 3.06 ghz"?? I know I certainly did...

  • Thank you, Captain Obvious! (Score:4, Funny)

    by llamaluvr ( 575102 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:39AM (#5324919) Journal
    Tom's Hardware brings you this startling revelation: Newer processors are faster than older processors!

  • What's this trying to prove (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tarnin ( 639523 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:40AM (#5324920)
    Something that the business industry already knew? Most companies are not running out and buying the latest and greatest computers for their offices. Why? No need. Why does Bob the data entry clerk need a 3ghz machine with a TI4600 and 2 gigs of ram on an asus board? He can probably do his job fine on a 600mhz machine or less and companies know this. Guess what, Bob has a 600mhz machine if hes lucky or if thats the min requirement for his Excel spreadsheet.
    • Maybe someday soon they'll figure out a way to partition the clock cycles on processors so that Bob can use 300-600 or whatever he needs to do his work, and the rest of it can go to a distributed supercomputer that does the company's "heavy lifting".
    • He can probably do his job fine on a 600mhz machine or less and companies know this.

      One interesting side-effect of this is the spectrum of device interfaces seen in an office (and causing headaches for the staff). big-plug, PS2, & USB keyboards. Parallel, network, and USB printers. Serial, PS2, and USB mice. Parallel, serial, SCSI, IDE, USB, and Firewire scanners, Zip drives, CD drives, etc. The last six years has really cluttered offices with lots of working (often expensive, too) but plug-incompatible stuff. How's that for efficiency.
  • We have an old Pentium 133 here setup as the ISDN router. Works perfectly! Also got a DHCP and DNS-cache on it.

    Heck, a 486 could do all that!

  • Influence of memory? (Score:3, Informative)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:43AM (#5324932) Homepage Journal
    For clarification: to ensure that the CPU (or platform) is the dominant influence on the overall performance, we fitted all systems with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP display adapter and 512 MB of RAM.

    Wait a minute, surely size isn't the only parameter of the memory that matters? Sure, you have to ensure there's no swapping (if you don't your benchmarks are sure to be totally screwed), but apart from that shouldn't memory bandwidth and latency be good enough to ensure that CPU is the dominant factor? Here [arstechnica.com] is a nice article on this.

    • shouldn't memory bandwidth and latency be good enough to ensure that CPU is the dominant factor

      Memory bandwidth and latency are determined by the CPU in a vast majority of the platforms tested. For example: take an Atlhon with a 200MHz bus... Fit it with DDR400. No matter what is it going to be able to access all that extra bandwidth, since the CPU bus is saturated. Thereby, the CPU becomes the dominant factor even when taking those factors into account.

      I'm sure there are exceptions, so feel free to point them out ;)

  • Which reminds me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:45AM (#5324939) Homepage

    I've recently put together three boxen for family and friends from my spares pile. We're talking 120-150Mhz PIs, 48-64MB SIMM RAM, 1GB drives, quad speed CD-ROMs, 56K modems and 1MB S3 cards, with Win98SE, Word 97, Outlook Express and not much else.

    Now, to me and thee, that spec sucks, but to someone that just wants a box for email, browsing and word processing, it does everything that they need to do, as fast as they need to do it.

    Sure, I like being able to buy 3Ghz monsters, but you need to sell a lot of systems to make back the the cost of the R&D for them. And given that we should all be aware by now of the environmental cost of computer systems, I'm going to be keeping "obsolete" hardware in service just as long as I can, and thumb my nose at the marketeers who tell me that there are compelling reasons to upgrade other than the magic smoke [astrian.net] getting out.

    • Looking the the specs of your cobbled-up machines, I think they'll be fine except I would recommend getting at least 128 MB of RAM installed. Windows 98/98SE runs very well indeed with 128 MB installed because the OS doesn't swap to hard disk virtual memory so often, which speeds up performance quite a bit (sometimes as much as 100% over the original setup!).
    • The other day I had occasion to boot a Win95 machine (complete Netware 4.11 networking, IP, printers, etc) and was blown away by how fast it booted.

      It was on a PII450, but still, even high end PIII systems take double that amount of time to boot 2K and XP.

  • Gigahertz (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:49AM (#5324954)
    there is another group at the other end of the scale - video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes."

    There's an old saying, if you sit down at the poker table and don't know who the sucker is, it's you. Any gamer would be better off saving some money on CPU and spending it on graphics card, memory and SCSI disks. The PC architecture is so unbalanced that the only thing a top-end CPU is good for is boasting about.
    • Depends.

      If you're buying the absolute, top of the line CPU, then yes, you're a fool. Unless you have to do some serious number crunching where time really is money, it doesn't matter that much. Back off a few revs on the CPU and you'll cut the cost by 60-70% for little speed difference.

      But once you're down to that point, then cutting back further doesn't do you any good. It may be a drop of less than $10 to the next speed down. And if $10 makes that much difference in affording the computer, I suggest reprioritizing your spending habits.

      If you're a gamer, then, yeah... drop some more money on video or memory. Just realize that for graphics, you may as well go for a GF4 Ti4200 or Radeon 9500 Pro or jump up to a Radeon 9700 Pro - which is a considerable gap. But anything in between just isn't worth the money. For memory, there isn't much that needs more than half a gig of memory (right now - it'll grow), unless you start playing with things like video editing.

      For hard drives... SCSI? Why bother? I mean... really. IDE isn't the god awful monstrosity it used to be. Modern drives are fast, big, and cheap. If you want a bit of added speed, you can go for a RAID config, but you're going to spend a lot more money than you'll get back in peformance. SCSI just isn't worth it at all for the desktop PC - even for video editing it's questionable. For servers it's another matter, but we're not talking servers here.
    • Your statement is flat-out untrue. Most current games are CPU-limited, even with the best video cards.

      See this article on AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1650 [anandtech.com]

      In particular, the charts on this page [anandtech.com] that indicate that the GeForce4 Ti4600 scales up with CPUs all the way to the fastest CPU that was available when the article was written.

      Faster graphics cards will only be further limited by the CPU, achieving a smaller percentage of their full potential.

      The PC architecture is a little less imbalanced than you think. Spending extra money on a video card your CPU can't feed triangles too fast enough is a complete waste of money, too. Sucker.

    • I'd disagree on SCSI disks. IDE has gotten real good lately. For things like games, SCSI is just too much money for what you get. I find that wen gaming I'm rarely wating on my disk. Generally the processor or the grpahics card is the limit factor (ususally the graphics card).

      Unless you have a whole lot of multi user access like a file server or something I think IDE is probably the better soltution when you take price in to account.

    • balanced gaming system (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @01:26PM (#5327361)
      Any gamer would be better off saving some money on CPU and spending it on graphics card, memory and SCSI disks. The PC architecture is so unbalanced that the only thing a top-end CPU is good for is boasting about.

      Even construing your assertion charitably, I have to disagree. There is a sweet spot for each component in a PC. Let's use NewEgg [newegg.com] for a price check on the Athlon XP.

      price, UT2K3, CPU speed and type
      $ 63, 152 FPS, 1.47 GHz
      $117, 176 FPS, 1.8 GHz
      $156, 185 FPS, 2.0 GHz
      $261, 190 FPS, 2.08 GHz (166 MHz DDR)
      $380, 210 FPS, 2.08 GHz (166 MHz DDR, 512 KB L2 cache)
      The Unreal Tournament 2003 numbers [tomshardware.com] are with the current video champ, the Radeon 9700 Pro. Notice that they increase linearly with CPU speed (although not price, unfortunately).

      You can certainly argue that the $120 premium for the most expensive Athlon XP at NewEgg is not worth 20 FPS (i.e., 46% more expensive, compared to 11% faster). I agree. On the other hand, $120 will not buy you an upgrade from a 120 GB "special edition" IDE drive to a comparable SCSI drive. Even if you did spring for a 10,000 or 15,000 RPM SCSI drive, you would be unlikely to experience faster game play.

      The problem with arguing that the PC architecture is unbalanced is that the game writers already know that. They limit texture detail, so that your main memory is barely a factor, let alone your hard drive. I recommend the following for a serious gaming system:

      CPU "sweet spot," currently around 2 GHz
      video card current generation, 64 MB (e.g., GeForce 4 Ti 4200)
      memory 512 MB, 133 MHz DDR or faster
      hard drive 60 GB, 7,200 RPM or faster
      Tweak as desired.

  • Where's Cyrix? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Koyaanisqatsi ( 581196 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:55AM (#5324979)
    Granted it's dead now, but they once stood much like AMD today as a alternative to Intel CPUs. They even started the trend to call CPUs not by its clock (MHz), but by it's "P-rating", roughly how it benchmarked against Intel CPUs.
    • hey, they're thg, what did you except?

      well, i did also except to see cyrixes there, since they would have been the only INTRESTING point there. also the new (cyrix derived?) via c3's&etc would have been much much much much more intresting than 65 intel/amd cpu's.. now the article is just impressive but totally useless.

      not to mention how much intresting it could have been with different architechtures too, not just pc. now there was nothing exotic even in there. who wants to read about dated ordinary hardware?
      • > also the new (cyrix derived?) via c3's&etc would have been much much much much more intresting than 65 intel/amd cpu's..

        FWIW, I just put together a linux machine based on the VIA C3M266 motherboard and 1 GHz Via (Cyrix) C3. This machine serves as a firewall, file server, web server, and mail server for a small network. It's on all of the time so I thought that a low power solution would be nice. The machine it was replacing was a dual PPro 150, and it is definitely much faster than that, and runs quieter and cooler.

        Since it was replacing an existing machine, the process I went through was to:
        1) Build a C3 compatible kernel. (The C3 has no "cmov" instruction, a ppro optimized kernel won't work!)
        2) Build the appropriate drivers for the the devices on board. (Of biggest concern, VIA IDE drivers and the VIA-Rhine ethernet driver.)
        3) Replace motherboard, hook everything up.
        4) Profit. (OK, just kidding.)

        Anyways, it ended up being a completely smooth transition. I could not find any info about running Linux on the VIA C3M266 before hand, so I thought I'd share my experience.
    • Yes, Cyrix once stood actually ahead of AMD, and for about 1 month between the p200, and the ppro200, the 6x86 PR200+ (dumb name) was the fastest on the market, well, for business apps.

      But it wasn't really meant to be, when mmx stuff came out cyrix was the last to join in, and then they were too slow. Sure, the 6x86mx 233 was FASTER than the PII 233, but people weren't buying the pII 233, they were buying at 300mhz.

      Now Cyrix has been sold to VIA, and they are using it as a budget, low power cpu. It's just on the wrong socket. I probably would have bought a VIA system at one time, but I can't afford INTEL upgrades, and you can't get a VIA for a athlon MB.

      • Re:Where's Cyrix? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
        No, Cyrix was sold to VIA, but VIA isn't using the Cyrix design any more. They released a chip based on the Cyrix stuff originally, but it sucked. Then they bought Centaur as well, and the current VIA C3 is based on Centaur's WinChip family and made by the same design team.
    • Actually I seem to remember Cyrix's P-rating being more something that they pulled out of their ass and WISHED it was how the chip performed. A Cyrix P-166 seemed to perform rather slower than an AMD or Intel 166mhz chip.

      AMD's numbers seem a little more on the money (though they claim they aren't directed at Intel chips) but I still find problematic. The problem is if you look at their chips the trend seems to be up the number by 100 for every 66mhz of clock increase. Well the thing is no processor can exhibit better than linear scaling with mhz, it's just a physical impossability. If you double the mhz of a chip, and leave everything else the same you will at BEST double the performace. Realistically, you won't actually get double for a number of reasons. So AMD's PR system is rather misleading.
  • Anyone else noticed that contrary to what AMD would like you to believe by the 3000+ model naming, the intel pentium 4 3.06Ghz performed mcuh better than AMD 3000+ in every benchmark.
    • it's not supposed to compare to 3.06ghz p4. 2.8ghz p4 doesn't even compare to 3.06ghz ht p4.

      iirc the amd pr ratings are how it would compare to a tbird cored athlon.

  • 486 good enough for some tasks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:58AM (#5324989)
    My parents, believe or not, have been using a 486SX running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 since 1994. They run some invoicing and Word 2.0 and it runs quite fast for that purpose. "Why do I need a faster computer?" my father asks. "The invoices won't print any faster, will they? "

    I showed them Win98 on my laptop. They hated it.

    • I recently booted up a 486-DX2 system that I had in the closet. The processor seemed okay, but I couldn't get over the 3400RPM hard drive (yuck).

      Even on todays GHz machines, the hard drive still crawls (but a little faster at 7200RPM). The processors are so damn fast now that the disks are just shameful.

  • Also left out (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scharkalvin ( 72228 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @08:00AM (#5324993) Homepage
    They forgot the Pentium Pro, Xeon cpus, and the winchip. As someone else mentioned as well, cyrix.

    Also forgot the 486SX (worth forgetting). BTW the celeron came AFTER the PII.
    • And the processor I am using right now and their breed, the Mobile versions of chips. It would also have been nice if they had managed to include the Motorola chips, Alpha and Sparc, though I guess they would have had to test on Linux. Come to think of it, perhaps someone should try and do this for all oof Debian's supported architectures (does anything else run on as many platforms)?

  • Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SecretAsianMan ( 45389 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @08:05AM (#5325014) Homepage
    an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program

    Have you ever run DOS 6.22 on a P133? It's blazing fast. If you must run a DOS app, it would almost be folly to run it on anything more than a P133! Of course, the P133 was not the processor of DOS's heyday; the 80386 was. By the time of the P133, the industry had already begun to migrate to Win95 (or OS/2, or Linux, or you favorite OS - no flames needed here) :-)

    in "real-time mode"

    Sorry to pick nits on Slashdot, but you probably meant "real mode", though I could be wrong. Real-time and real mode are very different animals.

  • I know that a 3ghz p4 is going to cream my old pentium166 but I did not think there would be a x100 difference in performance. There is also a x80 performance difference between a p166 and a 3ghz pIV in Unreal Tournament using a top of the line ATI RAEDON 9700. I imagine the performance is probably close to a x1000 as fast compared to my p166 with the original vodoo1 card.

    My guess is its faster memory, hard drive, and buss speeds is what really makes the newer systems so much faster when doing things like ripping mp3's. I find it hard to believe that the actual cpu itself is x100 slower. It may also show why wintel and lintel pc's are taking over the unix workstation market. Traditionally only unix workstations had good i/o but this is now changing.

    I assumed these x100 and x80 performance gains would be between something like a 8086 and a PIV. Not from hardware I used back only in 97-2001. You should see how long it takes to load kde3 on it.

    • Well, the associated systems do help, but there really have been leaps and bounds in processor performance. For one thing, processors are doing more per clock cycle. I don't really want to go digging around on Intel's site, but instruction timing charts can be illuminating. For example, a 386 and 486 seem like real similar chips, I mean I have trouble thinking of a function that teh 486 has that the 386 doesn't. Yet, a 486 at a given clock speed performs better than a 386 at a given clock speed. Why? It takes less time for a 486 to complete more instructions. Multiply this by several generations and it start to get real pronounced.

      Then also there are new ways of processing data. Like SIMD subsystems (SSE, 3dnow, Altivec). For some applicaiton like, say, MPEG-4 encoding it can make a HUGE difference, on the order of a 2-4x speedup on the same processor.

      One of my facourite comparisons is OS CPU usage. Back in the 486s days, I had Windows 95. It used a significant and noticable amount of CPU time. I had to quit to DOS to play many games and even to decode a 128k MP3 in stereo. Now, Windows 2000 and XP use such a small amount of CPU time it's insignificant. Less than a processor-minute per day. Now I can tell you 2k and XP sure as hell have MUCH higher overhead than 95. However processors are so much faster that the amount of time they need in overhead as a percentage is just insignificant.

  • So what...? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @08:08AM (#5325031) Homepage Journal
    All right, all right, don't get all excited, now! These young ones, thinking computing actually started with Windows 2000 and Pentium III...

    Here is what I use at home:
    1. Intel Pentium 120MHz + 128MB RAM. 2.5GB HDD. 40x CD-ROM. Running under Windows 98SE.
    2. Pentium 133MHz + 128MB RAM. 3.0GB HDD. 16x CD-ROM. Running under Slackware 8.1.
    3. AMD K6-2 550MHz + 256MB RAM. 6GB HDD. 16x CD-R/W. Running under Slackware 8.1.
    4. Pentium III 850 MHz + 384MB RAM. 20GB HDD. 40x CD-ROM. Running under Slackware 8.1.


    I kid you not. =)

    It's pathetic, I know.

    Now, from the list above, can you guess:
    1. Which 'puter is my main workstation?
    2. Which 'puter is used exclusively for opening Word files?
    3. What is my favourite Linux distro?
    4. Which machine is the one that I really paid a lot of money for, especially since it's a Thinkpad laptop?
    ... Not too hard, eh? =)
    • All of your machines have at least 128 MB of system RAM installed.

      CNET.com did an article online a couple of years ago talking about the cheapest way to quickly increase performance for your computer. Their conclusion: get more RAM installed first. Easy to understand why--with more RAM installed, any operating system will dramatically lower their need to use hard disk space for virtual memory swapping, which can in some cases increase system performance as much as 100 percent.

      My home machine runs a slow-by-2003 standard Celeron A 500 MHz CPU, but because the machine has 320 MB of system RAM installed both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 Professional run reasonably quick because both versions of Windows has very little need to do virtual memory paging on the hard drive.
      • All of your machines have at least 128 MB of system RAM installed.

        On the way to wisdom, you are, young padawan!

        (Sorry, couldn't resist!)
      • Indeed.

        I built my first PC for uni in late 98. It was a K6-2-300 which wasn't top then. Dell were selling 600mhz machines by then, however they were still fitting 32MB RAM to some of them.

        I spent 1/5th of the cost of the PC on 256MB RAM. It wiped the floor with any of the 600mhz machines at uni.

        That 256 lives on in my now 512MB Athlon 1.4ghz, the only part of the machine other than the case and the TV card that's still there. (Most of said machine has been reused in another PC though)

        --

        Ditto my work laptop. It's a celeron 400 and did have 64MB and Windows 95. My very first job (without telling management) was to quickly buy the upgrade to 192MB (most it'll take) with £20 of my own cash and put XP on it.

        In terms of going home at a sensible time it's more than paid for itself.

  • Wow this is great! (Score:3, Funny)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @08:10AM (#5325042) Homepage
    I didn't know a P4 3.06Ghz CPU was noticably faster than my P100 in OpenGL. I guess it's time to upgrade my Quaking machine!

  • older P's and 486's (Score:2, Interesting)

    by magwm ( 466805 )
    what's the point in adding them to the list if there is no benchmark of them? Hilarious that they want to install winxp on them.. 'course it doesnt work, DUH! i would love to see a win98-winxp comparison on a P100..
    Anyway I am in constant search of these lower speed processors 'cause they are perfect for mp3-players and control jobs! in combination with win98lite it's perfect!
  • Now we can actually see in ONE place the march of progress! That and I can see where my paltry Athlon 900 rates these days, *sighs* time for that upgrade. :)

  • ...Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode"...

    Running DOS on a pentium? Blasphemy. That's what a 486 is for.

  • You forget how good old computers were (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @08:38AM (#5325189)
    "Opinions on what constitutes "adequate computing speed" vary greatly from one user to the next. [One] person may be perfectly content with an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode"

    You're just as guilty of diminishing the usefulness and power of old computers. You forget what those computers did in their day. Did a Pentium 133 typically run real-mode DOS programmes? No, you have to go back a few more years. I have a Pentium 166 running NT4 with IE6 and Office 97, which is far more sophisticated than any DOS programme. It does it very well.

    Then there's my network server that also does web and mail for the internet too. It's a P75 and running Debian 3.

    Performance of old computers doesn't deteriorate with time. They still run the programmes of a few years ago just as well. They even run some of the programmes of today too.

    If you had said "286" instead of "Pentium 133", I might have accepted your comment.

  • All X86 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by megan_of_wutai ( 649071 )
    Hmph... x86 cpus, lots and lots of x86 cpus and nothing else.

    There were much more interesting (and way faster) cpus coming out around the time of the P5.

    I can understand them doing it this way, what with the ease of benchmarking (although they even had problems with that, cpus returning 0) but the fact that I can't recall a single non-X86 article on Tom's hardware might have been more of an influence on them than the practical difficulties of benchmarking.

    That it completely misses out a generation of cpus (Pentium 2) is also mildly annoying.

    Admittedly though, seeing 3Dmark run on a Pentium 100 was quite fun :)

  • We've donated most of my older systems; I never throw away a working CPU. Most go to my parents (who still have the old family Kaypro II running on CP/M!). I just turned over to my Dad the oldest machine in my fleet, a 233MHz Pentium MMX box. He's using it for his electronics lab.

    We've also donated older computers to poor activists in various social causes.

    The lowest-end system at Coyote Gulch is a 400MHz Celeron laptop, which my wife uses for web browsing and e-mail.

    Come to think of it, my Sun Ultra 10 is running a 300MHz UltraSparc IIi.

    Old boxes can be upgraded and kept going for a very long time. My primary Windows box is currently an 800MHz Pentium III; it began life as 400MHz Pentium II. I keep upgrading the video card and the processors; it still does a very nice job of connecting me to the Microsoft universe. The Radeon 9000 Pro video card lets me run Morrowind and other "high end" games acceptably.

    Of course, Linux gets the best machines. I recently acquired a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 system with RDRAM, and it's never been sullied by Windows. I use it for software development and number crunching, so the horsepower is important.

    My other Linux box, though, is a constantly-upgraded dual 600MHz Pentium III system. It began life as a uniprocessor IBM workstation at 400MHz... in its current configuration, it is my main machine for long-run simulations. I may upgrade it one more time to dual 1.2GHz Celerons.

    "Obsolete" is in the mind of the beholder. Look at the charts on Tom's site, and you'll see that the latest processors are *not* as fast as you might expect from comparing MHz numbers.

    Consumer culture convinces us that we need something that we don't. While some of us can use the power of the 3GHz processor, the masses have no need for such a beast. This is one major reason the PC industry has slowed so dramatically -- people who have working systems see no need to upgrade. They're smart in tight times, because, for them, there is no reason to upgrade.

    Still, in a society where bigger is better, folls will keep running out the door to buy the latest and greatest, if only to be "bigger" than their neighbors.

  • The first problem with the benchmarks is that all of the systems had 512 MB of RAM. While that's the best way to gauge raw CPU power, the problem is that very few systems had anything near that level of power. IIRC, I spent somewhere between $50 and $100 USD back in 1998 for 64 megs -- outfitting a PC with 512 megs would have been prohibitively expensive. While it's nice to look at the benchmarks as a "best case" scenario, older CPUs would have performed much worse due to swapping.

    Also, while the Pentium II is mentioned in Intel's history, it's not in the benchmarks. The Celeron used the same core, but with a differnt L2 cache setup (2nd generation Celerons had 128 KB at full CPU speed, while the P2 had 512 KB at half CPU speed).
  • The main reason to buy a new cpu is to do something you COULDN'T do before.
    Many people upgraded to 386 to run win31. Not so many went for the 486. Again to use win95 and play let's say mp3 you needed a Pentium. so many people upgraded to pentium.

    (notice that i am talking about upgrades, not all those people that bought NEW computers at the time).

    Still P-100 was ok for almost anything, nobody upgraded to P-200, or even P-MMX when they came out. But you can't watch movies on a Pentium ( well, maybe a pentium 233 MMX) and those old soyo's didn't come with USB support (not before the MMX family again). So everybody rushed for P-II's.

    At this point , you can do (almost) anything a P-4 3 Ghz does on a simple celeron 333. There is no need to upgrade. Since 1999 we are still waiting for the next killer app. (Games? yeah, sure)

    Till them my poor celeron, with 768 MB of really cheap RAM and my faithfull G400 will be just fine.
  • I just ordered a Athlon 1700 to replace my 266. It's been long overdue but when I researched the motherboard, I found many people upgraded on the 0's (from a 1000 to a 2000, 2000 to 30000). I always wait until the performance doubles. Thus far, that has not happened with the 1700's. And the 1700 was $50.

    So my rationale is that I will upgrade when the performance doubles and I will get a chip that I can get cheap, like the 1700. And I always get a new motherboard because they add so much cool stuff (like USB 2.0 and Firewire and video and sound). I got a new motherboard with 5 channel sound and video onboard for $60. So I go from a 266 to a 1700 for $110 with free shipping at Newegg. Righteous!
    • I almost agree with you, in fact I agree with you in principle but my threshhold is higher. Then again I have a LOT of crap on my machines that needs to be migrated when I get a new machine.

      I generally won't bother with a new machine until it is 3x as fast as my old one. Thinking back through my home system history it went

      386sx-16, 2M / 40M
      486DX-40, 4M (later upgraded to 16M) / 340M
      486DX/4-133 (upgraded the CPU)
      PII-300 64M / 6.4G - went through the following upgrades:
      Upgrade RAM to 768M
      Added 20G HD
      Added a SCSI RAID controller with 32M of writeback cache and two u160 9.1G drives in RAID0
      Upgrade CPU to 900MHz Celeron
      OC'ed the CPU just a little.

      Now I am considering a new machine, just as the prices on something 3x as fast as the last one are becoming reasonable.

      Anything less than 3x as fast just doesn't justify all the hassles of upgrading my system (reinstalling all your apps, etc...) ESP on a work machine. Takes me a lot of work to get my systems set up how I like em.

  • Not very comprehensive... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @09:28AM (#5325563) Homepage
    Wow. 65 processors and not a single Motorola or IBM chip. And so the megahertz myth marches on, unchallenged...
  • On the second page of the article, they have this text:

    Let's dip our toe into the waters right here: in order to compress a 1.2 GB DV-video file to MPEG 2, the 1996 Intel Pentium 166 MMX takes an excruciating 7,688 seconds - equivalent to two hours and eight minutes of processing time. By contrast, Intel's top of the range processor, the 3.06 GHz P4, completes this task under the same conditions in 292 seconds, or 4 minutes, 52 seconds. We are looking at a 26-fold difference in performance here.


    So, for an 18x increase in clock speed, they get a 26x improvement in performance. That means the number of instructions per clock has gone up by only a factor of two, at least for this application. That's not very impressive, considering how much extra hardware they've thrown at it over the years.
  • Lately, on of my friends (girl, actually) approched me saying that her dad wanted a new computer and had a 3.5k canadian pesos to put on it (about 2k US). I said no problem. He is a lawyer and couldn't tell a ps/2 ball mouse from a USB dual optical mouse. Anyway I built him a p4 2.56 with all the goodies and grabbed a 19" high res monitor. I set it all up for him and when I went to leave, happy that I made a happy fellow, he offered me his old computer, a k6-2 450. The moral of this story? I am sure that that k6-2, that is now my stp server at home(mp3, actually, only has 13.6 gig hard drive) is used more often and to it's full extent then the p4 he now has. He checks e-mails and does some browsing and VERY LITE photoshop. SO why, oh why, does he needs it? I could use that, but I made a computer in janurary that was 1k CND, about 600 US$, and it is a bomb. I enjoy working on it when I get home from school. And then I can drop my laptop and get serious. So tell me, do you have any rich people you built systems for? DO they use them to their full extent?

  • Take a statistics course! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by epukinsk ( 120536 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @09:48AM (#5325728) Homepage Journal
    The thing that drives me batty about Tom's Hardware is that he spends hours and hours running all these benchmarks and then presents his data in the most asinine way. He has 65 data points on a slew of scales and all he can think of to represent this is a dozen bar charts. Yippee.

    Tom, how about a scatter plot comparing release date with performance? Or a line plot comparing Intel's top performance with AMD's over the years? Maybe put the theoretical Moore's law curve in there for comparison too. The gentle sloping curve of your performance-sorted bar chart is meaningless. It's a waste of our time and yours.

    Another example of Tom being a graph ass is last years printer roundup [tomshardware.com]. He created one graph per printer per group of scales. So we get to compare the hp deskjet's [tomshardware.com] speed at standard resolution with it's maximum motor speed, but we can't compare the speed with that of the canon i850 without flipping back and forth to a different page.

    What a waste of good data.

    Erik

  • The CPUs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by olethrosdc ( 584207 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @12:32PM (#5326907) Homepage Journal
    I have to insert a comment here on the type of CPUs that were benchmarked. They were all x86 compatible CPUs. The flaws of the x86:

    Limited, assymetric instruction set.
    Small number of registers. Also assymetric in their use.
    Adding new features usually meant extending the instruction set in strange ways, adding even more 'special case' registers.

    What I'd like to see would be a good benchmark comparison between other similarly sucessful CPUs.

    The 68k and PowerPC series come to mind. Curiously, although the 68k had a much cleaner architecture (at least conceptually) the designers never managed to make it run significantly fast (went up to 60Mhz bus-speed. I think internal speed was 120Mhz).

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