I once had a boss who refused to upgrade our machines from 486s to Pentiums because of this exact reason. What we later found out was that if we compiled the c

I once had a boss who refused to upgrade our machines from 486s to Pentiums because of this exact reason. What we later found out was that if we compiled the code on a 486, none of the newer SIMD instructions were used, so the performance difference was actually more pronounced than we first realized. We eventually had a special build environment, but the target market was newer processors anyway, so there was no reason, other than lack of funds, to not upgrade the engineers' machines.