6 ms·

I've got a similar story. In 1998 a had a summer job, as a programmer, in a little shop that built computers. At the time there was a short of Pentium II 300Mh

by perbu 4y ago

I've got a similar story. In 1998 a had a summer job, as a programmer, in a little shop that built computers. At the time there was a short of Pentium II 300Mhz chips. One day the logistics guy mentioned they had gotten a batch of Pentium II 300Mhz marked with an operating voltage of 2.0V, instead of the usual 2.8V. Hmm. Intel had taken a bunch of their most expensive CPUs, PII-450Mhz, using the brand new 250nm process and rebranded them as the cheapest CPUs which were at the time built with a 350nm process. You could just take this, stick in a motherboard an change the base frequency and you'd have the best CPU Intel could make. We never sold any of those CPU to customers. We all bought ourselves new CPUs that day.

krylon 4y ago
Something similar might have happened with Celeron 300 CPUs, I recall they could be overclocked to 450MHz as well without trouble. I think they didn't have as much cache as the Pentium II, but the increased clock rate meant you could get a pretty fast CPU for cheap.
- smcl 4y ago
  Yep, the Celeron 300A: https://www.anandtech.com/show/174/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/174/3
  - vasac 4y ago
    Especially those manufactured in Malaysia, as they could be overclocked more successfully than the 300As made in Costa Rica. Fun times.
    - ableal 4y ago
      I seem to remember that the 300A overclock was first published by Tom's Hardware - a site started by a German medical doctor, as implausible as that sounds. I was trying to confirm this, but he didn't claim credit for that in this interview: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/20-year-anniversary,4552-7.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/20-year-anniversary,455... P.S. Also, some twenty years ago another MD rewrote the Linux scheduler, because he wanted better interactive performance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas
      - AnotherGoodName 4y ago
        The first to do it was probably the first to touch the CPU given how established over clocking was by that era. So it could be tom but it's just not that significant if it was or wasn't.
        jghn 4y ago
        Yeah, "let's see if I can overclock this a bit" was the first thing many people did as soon as they got any new chip. The 300A was notable both because of how far they could be pushed but also how it worked for basically all of them & not outliers.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - rasz 4y ago
      a myth, Malaysia/Costa Rica was packaging plant designation and had nothing to do with binning or actual fabs.
  - jghn 4y ago
    The Celeron 300A might still be the best bargain in CPU history. I put together a bunch of PCs with them for myself & friends/family. Not all of them could get to 450mhz, but all of them were able to clocked much higher than 300. And with the L2 cache on the chip, it already was better clock-for-clock than contemporary products. While from an objective amount 50-150mhz is peanuts in today's terms, that was a huge step up relative to the original speed.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      5820K and 5960X have hit nearly similar overclocks in recent memory - chips with 3.4 and 3.3 GHz all-core turbo had a majority of chips (~75-79%) going to 4.5 GHz. 4.5/3.3 = 36% overclock, which is quite high by modern standards. Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E were fantastic overclockers too with many samples going to 4.7 GHz (even on HEDT!). Broadwell-E, too, could hit some solid clocks if you were willing to push more voltage... a lot of people got later samples to 4.7 GHz despite the numbers being closer to 4.3 in SiliconLottery's tests. Probably an uncomfortable amount of voltage and heat, but, Broadwell itself wasn't as bad as people took it to be, just the prices, and the L4 cache on Broadwell-C limiting the core clocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_processors#%22Haswell-E%22_(22_nm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_processo... https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics This is somewhat of a function of Intel not really pushing clocks in those days. 3.3 GHz all-core turbo is nowhere near what the silicon could deliver - generally I would punch in 4.1 GHz all-core on my 5820K and that would be stable without any other (explicit) settings adjustments. And that is a factor of the TDPs - in those days TDP on desktop was expected to cover your max boost under a (reasonably) worst-case load. It has been a thing for a long time in laptops, but the desktop market was different. AMD was actually the one who introduced the "boost TDP is higher than box TDP" concept (aka PPT) to the desktop market with Ryzen 1000 - and then Intel started following suit once they started ramping up core counts and clocks with the 8700K/9900K. But 140W is actually plenty for a hexacore or even octocore running at 3.3 GHz and even under a worst-case load scenario... and 91W is plenty for a quad-core running at max turbo too. The numbers weren't as phony back then. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-91w-review-the-new-stock-performance-champion/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-...
  - perbu 4y ago
    No. It was a proper Pentium II chip, originally binned as a 450Mhz chip. There was a shortage of the low end chip and they re-badged a bunch of high end chips to fill a whole in the market. Tells you a lot of CPU production economics.
- dspillett 4y ago
  IIRC the Celeron chips coming out of the fabs tested better than Intel expected with far more of the batches being rated as stable as higher-spec units. This lead to a shortage of cheaper units that people were trying to buy and an excess of faster units that people didn't want to pay for. To avoid both missing sales and having a lot of stock sat in warehouses, many batches of Celeron chips that had tested fine to be sold as the faster models were binned with those that were only rated for the slower speeds. This meant that if you were lucky you could safely overclock the cheaper units by officially extravagant amounts, without extra special cooling arrangements or other hacks, and many did. You could tell (at least initially, I'm not sure if Intel changed this later) from part of the product code that you definitely had one of the units from a batch that tested fine at the higher speeds, so it wasn't that much of a gamble either. We referred to them as Silly-ron CPUs.
- simondotau 4y ago
  Not only could you overclock the Celeron 300A, with the right motherboard you could run two of them in a dual CPU configuration.[0] This was my first high performance computer! Initially I dual booted Windows NT 4 and Windows 98, but soon enough Windows 2000 was released and allowed me to make practical everyday use of the two cores. It was an extremely satisfying computer to own. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The ABIT BP6 was a legend; and it was kind of amazing that Intel hadn't done their "licensing" or whatever such that it was impossible to make; good thing clones were around. Of course now every CPU is its own multiprocessor machine, but back then it was a real screamer, and unless you could get multi-CPU Windows it was a real reason to poke around with Linux.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      How does the memory work on that board? Is there a single northbridge with a single memory controller that both CPUs can somehow utilize?
      - fredoralive 4y ago
        The 440BX chipset supports two CPUs, so it is organised so that the northbridge is shared between the CPUs[1]. I found a datasheet[2] and from a skim and it looks like the front side bus is also shared between the CPUs. [1] This is from the era before the memory controller / northbridge was integrated with the CPU. [2] https://datasheet.octopart.com/FW82443BX-Intel-datasheet-5334749.pdf https://datasheet.octopart.com/FW82443BX-Intel-datasheet-533... - page 12 has the basic system diagram
        bombcar 4y ago
        It was similar to other dual-processor boards out at the time; those were just very expensive and for very expensive "server" CPUs. I remember having an older Pentium Pro motherboard with dual sockets.
- userbinator 4y ago
  I believe the smaller cache was the reason it could overclock so high; a similar story happened later in the Netburst era, when the ~2.4GHz Celerons could go over 4GHz with sufficient cooling and sometimes a slight increase in voltage.
  - perbu 4y ago
    This wasn't really overclocking. Intel ran out of PII-300's and sold a bunch of of PII-450s as PII-300s to fill the whole in the market. CPU economics are weird.
- williamDafoe 4y ago
  I did that. My first gaming computer was a Celeron 300 overclocked to 400 with a 3dfx card. At the time celerons we're just getting off the ground and there was virtually no difference in performance - just a much cheaper price!
Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
Intel is still doing something similar - the cheaper CPUs from the 13th gen have cores from the previous 12th generation. But some OEM processors come with the newer raptor lake cores. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/not-every-core-i5-13400f-is-the-same-raptor-b0-vs-alder-c0-lake-review/ https://www.hwcooling.net/en/not-every-core-i5-13400f-is-the...
- ilyt 4y ago
  I thought I had no trust left for Intel to lose, but now I lost that little sliver of trust that I didn't knew I still had
  - juujian 4y ago
    Out of all the things they have done this is the straw that broke the camel's back for you? If it has the advertised number of lanes, performance, etc., then it wouldn't affect me if I bought it, no? And if it did not have the advertised feature then it would be fraud and I would have a recourse? It's the same socket after all and I will never see how many nanometers the chips are. The i3's are locked down hard anyways.
  - deelowe 4y ago
    If this surprises you, I've got some bad news for you. Everyone does binning. Go buy 1000 5% resistors and test them. Instead of a normal distribution of tolerances, you'll find that there's an interesting trough around -2% to +2%. That's because all of the resistors are made using the same process and the lower tolerance ones are binned and sold at a higher price. Same goes for silicon. The dies are largely the same. Only later in the process, they get binned to a lower spec cpu by selectively disabling features. Generally, this is because the chip doesn't meet some spec, but there are cases where this is simple done to meet demand.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Not talking about binning, but getting previous generation of core in your "new" CPU. >Go buy 1000 5% resistors and test them. Instead of a normal distribution of tolerances, you'll find that there's an interesting trough around -2% to +2%. EEVBLog tested the 1% ones and it had gaussian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WAhTdWErrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WAhTdWErrU which means it couldn't really be 5% but binned Also 5% are usually carbon while 1% are metal film so no, try again.
maccard 4y ago
There's no guarantee that the processor you used was actually equivalent to the 450MHz one [0] It might have worked like that for your use cases and lifetimes, but if you have issues, or it's underperforming, Intel aren't going to help or support you. That said, it's neat when it works! [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/glossary-binning-definition,5892.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/glossary-binning-defini...
monocasa 4y ago
To be fair, with Moore's law cranking away at full tilt at ~300nm nodes, those 250nm chips were probably cheaper for them too.

by perbu 4y ago

krylon 4y ago

Something similar might have happened with Celeron 300 CPUs, I recall they could be overclocked to 450MHz as well without trouble. I think they didn't have as much cache as the Pentium II, but the increased clock rate meant you could get a pretty fast CPU for cheap.

smcl 4y ago
Yep, the Celeron 300A: https://www.anandtech.com/show/174/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/174/3
- vasac 4y ago
  Especially those manufactured in Malaysia, as they could be overclocked more successfully than the 300As made in Costa Rica. Fun times.
  - ableal 4y ago
    I seem to remember that the 300A overclock was first published by Tom's Hardware - a site started by a German medical doctor, as implausible as that sounds. I was trying to confirm this, but he didn't claim credit for that in this interview: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/20-year-anniversary,4552-7.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/20-year-anniversary,455... P.S. Also, some twenty years ago another MD rewrote the Linux scheduler, because he wanted better interactive performance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas
    - AnotherGoodName 4y ago
      The first to do it was probably the first to touch the CPU given how established over clocking was by that era. So it could be tom but it's just not that significant if it was or wasn't.
      - jghn 4y ago
        Yeah, "let's see if I can overclock this a bit" was the first thing many people did as soon as they got any new chip. The 300A was notable both because of how far they could be pushed but also how it worked for basically all of them & not outliers.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - rasz 4y ago
    a myth, Malaysia/Costa Rica was packaging plant designation and had nothing to do with binning or actual fabs.
- jghn 4y ago
  The Celeron 300A might still be the best bargain in CPU history. I put together a bunch of PCs with them for myself & friends/family. Not all of them could get to 450mhz, but all of them were able to clocked much higher than 300. And with the L2 cache on the chip, it already was better clock-for-clock than contemporary products. While from an objective amount 50-150mhz is peanuts in today's terms, that was a huge step up relative to the original speed.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    5820K and 5960X have hit nearly similar overclocks in recent memory - chips with 3.4 and 3.3 GHz all-core turbo had a majority of chips (~75-79%) going to 4.5 GHz. 4.5/3.3 = 36% overclock, which is quite high by modern standards. Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E were fantastic overclockers too with many samples going to 4.7 GHz (even on HEDT!). Broadwell-E, too, could hit some solid clocks if you were willing to push more voltage... a lot of people got later samples to 4.7 GHz despite the numbers being closer to 4.3 in SiliconLottery's tests. Probably an uncomfortable amount of voltage and heat, but, Broadwell itself wasn't as bad as people took it to be, just the prices, and the L4 cache on Broadwell-C limiting the core clocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_processors#%22Haswell-E%22_(22_nm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_processo... https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics This is somewhat of a function of Intel not really pushing clocks in those days. 3.3 GHz all-core turbo is nowhere near what the silicon could deliver - generally I would punch in 4.1 GHz all-core on my 5820K and that would be stable without any other (explicit) settings adjustments. And that is a factor of the TDPs - in those days TDP on desktop was expected to cover your max boost under a (reasonably) worst-case load. It has been a thing for a long time in laptops, but the desktop market was different. AMD was actually the one who introduced the "boost TDP is higher than box TDP" concept (aka PPT) to the desktop market with Ryzen 1000 - and then Intel started following suit once they started ramping up core counts and clocks with the 8700K/9900K. But 140W is actually plenty for a hexacore or even octocore running at 3.3 GHz and even under a worst-case load scenario... and 91W is plenty for a quad-core running at max turbo too. The numbers weren't as phony back then. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-91w-review-the-new-stock-performance-champion/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-...
- perbu 4y ago
  No. It was a proper Pentium II chip, originally binned as a 450Mhz chip. There was a shortage of the low end chip and they re-badged a bunch of high end chips to fill a whole in the market. Tells you a lot of CPU production economics.
dspillett 4y ago
IIRC the Celeron chips coming out of the fabs tested better than Intel expected with far more of the batches being rated as stable as higher-spec units. This lead to a shortage of cheaper units that people were trying to buy and an excess of faster units that people didn't want to pay for. To avoid both missing sales and having a lot of stock sat in warehouses, many batches of Celeron chips that had tested fine to be sold as the faster models were binned with those that were only rated for the slower speeds. This meant that if you were lucky you could safely overclock the cheaper units by officially extravagant amounts, without extra special cooling arrangements or other hacks, and many did. You could tell (at least initially, I'm not sure if Intel changed this later) from part of the product code that you definitely had one of the units from a batch that tested fine at the higher speeds, so it wasn't that much of a gamble either. We referred to them as Silly-ron CPUs.
simondotau 4y ago
Not only could you overclock the Celeron 300A, with the right motherboard you could run two of them in a dual CPU configuration.[0] This was my first high performance computer! Initially I dual booted Windows NT 4 and Windows 98, but soon enough Windows 2000 was released and allowed me to make practical everyday use of the two cores. It was an extremely satisfying computer to own. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6
- bombcar 4y ago
  The ABIT BP6 was a legend; and it was kind of amazing that Intel hadn't done their "licensing" or whatever such that it was impossible to make; good thing clones were around. Of course now every CPU is its own multiprocessor machine, but back then it was a real screamer, and unless you could get multi-CPU Windows it was a real reason to poke around with Linux.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    How does the memory work on that board? Is there a single northbridge with a single memory controller that both CPUs can somehow utilize?
    - fredoralive 4y ago
      The 440BX chipset supports two CPUs, so it is organised so that the northbridge is shared between the CPUs[1]. I found a datasheet[2] and from a skim and it looks like the front side bus is also shared between the CPUs. [1] This is from the era before the memory controller / northbridge was integrated with the CPU. [2] https://datasheet.octopart.com/FW82443BX-Intel-datasheet-5334749.pdf https://datasheet.octopart.com/FW82443BX-Intel-datasheet-533... - page 12 has the basic system diagram
      - bombcar 4y ago
        It was similar to other dual-processor boards out at the time; those were just very expensive and for very expensive "server" CPUs. I remember having an older Pentium Pro motherboard with dual sockets.
userbinator 4y ago
I believe the smaller cache was the reason it could overclock so high; a similar story happened later in the Netburst era, when the ~2.4GHz Celerons could go over 4GHz with sufficient cooling and sometimes a slight increase in voltage.
- perbu 4y ago
  This wasn't really overclocking. Intel ran out of PII-300's and sold a bunch of of PII-450s as PII-300s to fill the whole in the market. CPU economics are weird.
williamDafoe 4y ago
I did that. My first gaming computer was a Celeron 300 overclocked to 400 with a 3dfx card. At the time celerons we're just getting off the ground and there was virtually no difference in performance - just a much cheaper price!

Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago

Intel is still doing something similar - the cheaper CPUs from the 13th gen have cores from the previous 12th generation. But some OEM processors come with the newer raptor lake cores. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/not-every-core-i5-13400f-is-the-same-raptor-b0-vs-alder-c0-lake-review/ https://www.hwcooling.net/en/not-every-core-i5-13400f-is-the...

ilyt 4y ago
I thought I had no trust left for Intel to lose, but now I lost that little sliver of trust that I didn't knew I still had
- juujian 4y ago
  Out of all the things they have done this is the straw that broke the camel's back for you? If it has the advertised number of lanes, performance, etc., then it wouldn't affect me if I bought it, no? And if it did not have the advertised feature then it would be fraud and I would have a recourse? It's the same socket after all and I will never see how many nanometers the chips are. The i3's are locked down hard anyways.
- deelowe 4y ago
  If this surprises you, I've got some bad news for you. Everyone does binning. Go buy 1000 5% resistors and test them. Instead of a normal distribution of tolerances, you'll find that there's an interesting trough around -2% to +2%. That's because all of the resistors are made using the same process and the lower tolerance ones are binned and sold at a higher price. Same goes for silicon. The dies are largely the same. Only later in the process, they get binned to a lower spec cpu by selectively disabling features. Generally, this is because the chip doesn't meet some spec, but there are cases where this is simple done to meet demand.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Not talking about binning, but getting previous generation of core in your "new" CPU. >Go buy 1000 5% resistors and test them. Instead of a normal distribution of tolerances, you'll find that there's an interesting trough around -2% to +2%. EEVBLog tested the 1% ones and it had gaussian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WAhTdWErrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WAhTdWErrU which means it couldn't really be 5% but binned Also 5% are usually carbon while 1% are metal film so no, try again.

maccard 4y ago

There's no guarantee that the processor you used was actually equivalent to the 450MHz one [0] It might have worked like that for your use cases and lifetimes, but if you have issues, or it's underperforming, Intel aren't going to help or support you. That said, it's neat when it works! [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/glossary-binning-definition,5892.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/glossary-binning-defini...

monocasa 4y ago

To be fair, with Moore's law cranking away at full tilt at ~300nm nodes, those 250nm chips were probably cheaper for them too.