4 ms·

K7. I remember when motherboard makers were shipping wares in unmarked cardboard boxes like you got porn from behind the counter. (In a brown paper baggie). AMD

K7. I remember when motherboard makers were shipping wares in unmarked cardboard boxes like you got porn from behind the counter. (In a brown paper baggie). AMD absolutely throttled Intel in 1999 with the K7 and later Athlons.

yuhong 16y ago
"I remember when motherboard makers were shipping wares in unmarked cardboard boxes like you got porn from behind the counter. " Ah, the beginning of Intel's antitrust troubles.
srean 16y ago
Those chips ran hot. I remember 40 degree celcius (104 F) summers with no AC, when I would compile the 2.4 version of linux kernel on my PC with its case removed. Those heat conducting pastes solved the problem eventually.
- johnyzee 16y ago
  I once watched a brand new K7 burn before my eyes. I had just installed it and wanted to power it up briefly before securing the heat sink and cooler. I had done this many times with Intel chips. Well, the AMD took exactly two seconds to go up in smoke and this broke college student was out a couple of hundred dollars.
  - bradleyland 16y ago
    No offense, but that's about the worst thing you can do to a modern processor. The only reason the Intel didn't go up in smoke was because of proper on-die thermal protection. You still should never boot a modern processor without the heat sink in place. The temperature will almost instantly exceed the thermal design limits of the materials. AMD's only poor decision was not to provide good thermal protection in their CPUs. Running the processor without a heat sink was your own poor decision.
- bradleyland 16y ago
  All chips of that generation ran hot. The clock speed arms race assured it. The AMD chips of similar generations generally ran cooler than the Pentium chips because AMD was squeezing more power out of fewer clock cycles, and therefore lower clock rates/power/heat dissipation/etc.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

yuhong 16y ago

"I remember when motherboard makers were shipping wares in unmarked cardboard boxes like you got porn from behind the counter. " Ah, the beginning of Intel's antitrust troubles.

srean 16y ago

Those chips ran hot. I remember 40 degree celcius (104 F) summers with no AC, when I would compile the 2.4 version of linux kernel on my PC with its case removed. Those heat conducting pastes solved the problem eventually.

johnyzee 16y ago
I once watched a brand new K7 burn before my eyes. I had just installed it and wanted to power it up briefly before securing the heat sink and cooler. I had done this many times with Intel chips. Well, the AMD took exactly two seconds to go up in smoke and this broke college student was out a couple of hundred dollars.
- bradleyland 16y ago
  No offense, but that's about the worst thing you can do to a modern processor. The only reason the Intel didn't go up in smoke was because of proper on-die thermal protection. You still should never boot a modern processor without the heat sink in place. The temperature will almost instantly exceed the thermal design limits of the materials. AMD's only poor decision was not to provide good thermal protection in their CPUs. Running the processor without a heat sink was your own poor decision.
bradleyland 16y ago
All chips of that generation ran hot. The clock speed arms race assured it. The AMD chips of similar generations generally ran cooler than the Pentium chips because AMD was squeezing more power out of fewer clock cycles, and therefore lower clock rates/power/heat dissipation/etc.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]